The Reasonable Viewer Is Scrolling

How the law distinguishes fact from satire when both land in the same feed

As someone who started college as a journalism major in 2020, trust that the phrase “fake news” has been ingrained in my media vocabulary. To this day,scholars have distinguished between “fake news” as deliberately invented stories posing as journalism and the use of the phrase itself to discredit legitimate news media. At Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, I was taught that the designation itself mattered less than the questions underneath it: Who published this? Where did the information come from? What evidence supports it? What context might be missing?

That training did not stop me from being fooled by a video from The Onion.

The 2011 segment, titled “Missing Teen’s Friends Go On TV To Plead For Her Release, Gossip About Ugly Classmates,” begins like a distressing morning-news interview. Two teenage girls appear on Today Now!, The Onion’s mock morning show, ostensibly to appeal for the return of their kidnapped friend. Almost immediately, however, their concern gives way to gossip about classmates, relationships, and whether “Stephy P” is wearing sweaters in May to hide a pregnancy.

When I first encountered the video on social media, it seemed just absurd enough to still be believable. The comments reinforced that impression, with several people responding as though the interview were genuine. With no attribution to The Onion or any indication that the clip was satire, it looked like a reposted segment from an unfamiliar morning show—not the most reliable route to a story, I admit, but not something I would immediately dismiss as fabricated either.

It was only after some Googling that I found the original attribution to The Onion. Once the embarrassment wore off, I became less interested in the fact that I had been fooled and more curious about why.A 2018 Science study examining roughly 126,000 stories on Twitter found that false news spread significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truthful news. The researchers also found that false stories were more novel, eliciting increased surprise and disgust in replies. While that in no way means every outrageous story is false (or that every true story is restrained), it suggests that novelty and extremity are poor sorting mechanisms in a feed where the most startling content may also be the most likely to travel.

That becomes particularly messy when entertainment is designed to exaggerate reality while actual reporting can involve events that sound equally unbelievable. When both show up on the same feed without clear sourcing, absurdity alone does not tell us much about which one we are watching.

That is what I want to explore in this post: where satire begins and reporting ends when both can look equally polished, provocative, and believable. What does the law expect an audience to recognize as a joke? What makes fabricated news legally different from satire? And what happens when the context that once distinguished the two is removed in a repost?

False, But Not Factual

Courts confronted that basic distinction well before the social-media feed existed. One useful starting point is Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell (1988).

The case centered on a Hustler parody of a real Campari advertising campaign. The original ads featured celebrities discussing their “first times,” using sexual double entendres before eventually revealing that they meant their first experience drinking Campari. Hustler recreated the format with televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr., attributing to him a fictional and obscene account of a drunken sexual encounter with his mother. At the bottom of the page, the magazine identified the piece as an “ad parody—not to be taken seriously,” while its table of contents labeled it fiction and parody.

Falwell sued for libel, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, ultimately prevailing only on the emotional-distress claim. The Supreme Court reversed that award. Because Falwell was a public figure, the Court held that he could not recover for emotional distress caused by a parody like this without showing a false statement of fact made with actual malice; importantly, the jury had already determined that the ad could not reasonably be understood as describing actual facts about him.

That is the part of Hustler that matters here. The ad was unquestionably false, but its falsity was not reasonably presented as fact. The First Amendment did not protect it because comedy receives a universal exemption from liability; it protected a work whose fictional account a reasonable reader was not being asked to accept as something that actually happened.

Two years later, the Supreme Court explained the limit of that protection in Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co. (1990). There, a newspaper column implied that a high school wrestling coach had lied under oath. The Court rejected a blanket First Amendment exception for anything labeled “opinion”: a statement without a provably false factual meaning may be protected, but a speaker cannot make a verifiable accusation immune simply by presenting it as a personal view.

Together, the cases establish two sides of the same coin. A fictional account that no reasonable reader would take literally can remain protected even though it is entirely invented, while a factual accusation does not escape scrutiny merely because the speaker calls it an opinion. That sounds relatively manageable until satire stops providing the signals that make it easy to identify.

When Comedy Requires a Straight Face

That complication sits at the center ofNovak v. City of Parma (2022).

In 2016, Anthony Novak created a Facebook page designed to resemble the official page of the Parma Police Department in Ohio. In less than a day, he posted several fictional announcements, including one advertising free abortions in a police van and another promoting a “Pedophile Reform event.” Some users praised the joke or identified the page as fake; others contacted the police department confused about whether it was real. Police eventually obtained warrants, arrested Novak, searched his apartment, and seized his phone and laptop. A jury later acquitted him of the criminal charge brought over the page.

Novak then sued the city and officers. In 2022, the Sixth Circuit held that the officers were entitled to qualified immunity on his remaining federal claims. That distinction is important: the decision did not broadly hold that parody pages are unprotected speech. The Sixth Circuit held that the officers were entitled to qualified immunity because Novak had not shown that clearly established law made their conduct unlawful under the circumstances.

When Novak asked the Supreme Court to review that ruling, The Onion entered the picture. In an amicus brief supporting him, The Onion argued that parody sometimes needs to fool its audience to work. Certain jokes, it explained, depend on being able to “tell the joke with a straight face”: parody can critique an institution precisely because it convincingly imitates the institution’s own voice or format before revealing the absurdity. Funny enough, The Onion demonstrated the point in the brief itself, introducing the publication—in otherwise convincing Supreme Court legalese—as an organization with 4.3 trillion daily readers before turning to its actual argument.

The Supreme Court denied Novak’s petition for certiorari, so The Onion’s argument did not become Supreme Court precedent. It does, however, complicate the relatively obvious parody in Hustler. Hustler practically handed readers an answer key: the ad carried a disclaimer, and the table of contents called it fiction. Novak did nearly the opposite, copying an official police page and, according to the Sixth Circuit, even deleting comments that identified his version as fake. The Onion clip I encountered is different again. Its creator had not concealed the publisher from the original audience; a later repost had stripped that information away.

Those differences matter because they show why initial believability cannot be the entire test. Sometimes a moment of confusion is part of the parody itself. In other situations, as with the clip I saw, that confusion may arise only after someone else removes the material that originally identified the joke. Either way, the more useful question is what the work, viewed as a whole, reasonably communicates, not whether someone, somewhere believed it on first glance.

The problem for the person scrolling is that the “whole” work may no longer be what reaches the screen.

News, Commentary, or Both?

Novak made one part of the problem easier for me to understand: satire may look real on purpose. The harder question is what happens when real events are discussed on a program associated with news, yet the court concludes that particular language should not be understood literally.

During my undergrad, I studied McDougal v. Fox News Network, LLC (2020), which arose from a 2018 episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight. In the months before the 2016 presidential election, American Media, Inc., the company behind the National Enquirer, had paid Karen McDougal $150,000 for the rights to her story about an alleged affair with Donald Trump. Michael Cohen later pleaded guilty to federal campaign-finance violations related to payments involving McDougal and another woman. Shortly before Cohen’s sentencing, Carlson used the segment to challenge why those payments were being treated as campaign-finance violations, and potentially as grounds for criminal liability or impeachment for Trump.

Carlson told viewers that, “for the sake of argument,” he would assume Cohen’s account was true. He then instructed his audience to “[r]emember the facts of the story,” called those facts “undisputed,” and described two women as having threatened to damage Trump's career and family unless he paid them. Carlson characterized the conduct as a “classic case of extortion.” McDougal sued Fox News for slander, alleging that he had falsely accused her of a crime.

The federal district court dismissed her claim, concluding that Carlson’s statements, when considered in the context of the full segment, amounted to rhetorical hyperbole and opinion commentary rather than actionable factual representations. The court separately found that McDougal, a public figure, had not plausibly alleged actual malice.

The ruling is sometimes flattened into the idea that no reasonable person would believe Tucker Carlson, but the opinion is both narrower and, in one respect, more interesting than that. The court did not classify every statement Carlson made, or Fox News as a whole, as entertainment. It did, however, rely on the particular program surrounding his remarks. The opinion pointed to the political talk-show setting, the “general tenor” of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson’s “for the sake of argument” qualification, and Fox’s contention that, given his reputation, a reasonable viewer would approach his statements with an “appropriate amount of skepticism.”

That is precisely what makes the case difficult for me. The same segment contained cues pointing in the other direction: Carlson expressly invoked “facts,” described them as “undisputed,” and spoke on Fox News Channel about an actual political controversy. I understand the legal distinction between laying out (or assuming) a factual premise and then offering a hyperbolic characterization of it. However, I’m less convinced that the line between the two would necessarily be as obvious to a viewer as it became to a court parsing the entire transcript after the fact.

McDougal is useful here not because it proves that cable news is secretly entertainment, but because it shows that courts may draw the fact-versus-commentary line inside a single broadcast rather than between different kinds of outlets. Yet, for someone scrolling past a clipped excerpt, the very material a court uses to locate that line may be the first thing to disappear.

What the Viewer Sees

Across these cases, I found myself returning to the same answer: courts are not really sorting entire publications or programs into boxes marked “news” and “entertainment.” They are asking what a particular statement or work would reasonably communicate in its full setting.

Hustler shows that deliberate fiction can remain protected when it does not reasonably communicate a fact. Milkovich prevents the “opinion” label from erasing the factual implications of a verifiable accusation. The Onion’s brief in Novak adds another wrinkle: parody can sometimes depend on looking convincingly real. And McDougal shows that courts may use tone, format, and the surrounding presentation to distinguish factual premises from nonliteral commentary even within a program devoted to real events.

That does not mean every false factual statement automatically becomes defamatory; defamation law has additional requirements that depend on the plaintiff, jurisdiction, and circumstances. But for the narrower question I started with, falsity alone does not answer very much. The law wants to know whether the speech reasonably carries a factual meaning in context.

Finding the original Onion video immediately changed my understanding, even though nothing within the clip itself had been altered. No one needed to rewrite the dialogue or manufacture a more convincing version; removing the publisher’s name was enough to take away the cue that told me how to interpret everything that followed.

That is where the legal standard and the modern feed start to pull in different directions. A court can reconstruct what surrounded a statement (the full publication, its source, its format, the words that came before and after), but the person encountering a repost may never receive any of that. The questions I learned to ask at Medill still work, but only once I realize something is missing that I need to go find.

The cases do not give me a perfectly clean rule for every borderline between satire, commentary, and factual assertion, and I am not sure one would be desirable. Satire needs room to imitate reality without announcing the joke before it lands, just as commentary requires room for exaggeration. At the same time, neither calling something ‘opinion’ nor delivering it as part of an entertainment-driven format automatically shields an otherwise verifiable factual accusation. The cases instead ask what was said, how it was presented, and what a reasonable audience would understand from the complete picture.

Which leaves me back where I started: how did I, an Onion fan who was trained to interrogate sources, mistake an Onion clip for real news? The cases gave me an answer I did not necessarily expect. Sometimes the distinction is not in the clip at all. Rather, it is in the source, framing, and surrounding material—all things a court can later reconstruct, and a repost can erase in seconds.

The law can ask what a reasonable viewer would understand in context, but it cannot guarantee that the viewer was given the context to begin with.