Former NBC News reporter Ben Collins, who recently became the CEO of satirical news website The Onion, declared “disinformation won” and said he isn’t concerned that his new gig could promote fake news if someone takes a meant-for-laughs headline seriously.
“My first instinct is to say, ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,’” Collins said during an interview on WBUR.
“I will say, The Onion, ironically, has been, even unironically, the most correct paper of my lifetime. When it was deeply unpopular in 2003, they were some of the first people to call out the Iraq war… they’ve been up on the moral panic on trans rights,” he continued. ‘They have a very steady moral compass, and also they are probably the funniest people I ever met.”
FORMER NBC NEWS ‘DISINFORMATION’ REPORTER BECOMES CEO OF THE ONION
Collins, who covered “disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News” according to his old author page, did not try to hide his left-wing political leanings, often firing off liberal missives on social media while a reporter.
“Disinformation won, there is no other way to put it,” Collins said.
During his time at NBC, Collins posted so much criticism over Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now known as X, that he was reportedly temporarily banned from covering the billionaire in 2022. He also fumed over the reporting about the “Twitter Files” that revealed internal communications between Twitter employees as they made the decision to block the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop reporting in 2020. Based on his comments to WBUR, the former journalist is still peeved.
“Musk sort of won the pipeline war with Twitter and then he turned it into a weird, spammy bot website where lies and conspiracy theories won out. Disinformation won,” Collins said.
NBC NEWS REPORTER BEN COLLINS REPEATEDLY ATTACKS, RIDICULES ELON MUSK WHILE COVERING TWITTER OWNER
“The best way to fight, in this moment, is to take that language, take that verbiage, of disinformation but kind of tell the truth with it,” Collins added. “That’s why we got into this.”
Despite his rhetoric against X, Collins has again become active on it in recent days, using Musk’s platform to promote The Onion.
In September, Collins threatened to leave journalism in 2024 “unless things dramatically change” but teased that he had been working on his “white whale stories to cap it off.” He only had one story published since then, which was a critical piece on Musk’s handling of X in October.
Collins had only six articles with his byline published between April 25, 2023 and April 25, 2024, the latest one being more than 200 days ago. During that time, he made various appearances on MSNBC, though he had not appeared on-air since early January when announcing his new gig last month.
Fox News Digital’s David Rutz contributed to this report.
