Back in May of last year, The Onion wrote a silly article satirizing the growing ridiculousness of the charges being levied against Planned Parenthood entitled “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex.” Unfortunately, due in part to the anti-PP tidal wave being brought forth by conservative media and the sad fact that there were still people in 2011 that didn’t understand The Onion or satire, a number of people thought the article was real, sharing it on social media platforms.

Despite being the butt of one of their typically darker than dark jokes, it’s clear that Glenn Beck is a fan of The Onion. A few months ago he filmed a great spot for the satirical paper’s fake (?) Pulitzer Prize campaign and now he’s got a cameo in tomorrow night’s episode of the Onion News News. IFC has released a clip and, as always, it’s pretty damn funny.

Vice President Joe Biden: foreign policy maven, train enthusiast, expert beer cooler? The Obama 2012 campaign seems to think so, as it is now featuring in its campaign store a beer koozie emblazoned with a smiling Biden, simply saying “Cheers Champ.” It’s not the only lighthearted campaign merchandise on the website– Obama supporters also have the option to purchase, say, a coffee mug with the President’s long-form birth certificate on it– but it may just be the funniest.

The Onion, the paper of satirical record, doesn’t really do “breaking news,” nor do they do “real” news. They also have tended to keep their Twitter straight business, posting just headlines and the accompanying links. When a “BREAKING” tweet sent from their account this morning broke into other’s streams, they took notice and began to wonder if the fake news’ twitter had been hacked by someone posting…fake news?

I know it’s been a few months, but, here at Mediaite, we’re still really bummed Onion SportsDome got canceled. Anyway, if there’s one bright spot in this dismal state of affairs, it’s that the other TV show from the folks behind The Onion, Onion News Network, is coming back for a second season and IFC’s got a clip up online.

In the past, The Onion has pretended to be sold off to a Chinese company, completely redesigning the website to start discussing fish. Just a few weeks ago, they pretended to start a celebrity-filled campaign to get a Pulitzer only to “reveal” that the whole thing was a “scam.” With a paper so thrilled to joke about its own reality, it’s unsurprising that many readers have been waiting for the punchline ever since it was announced that The Onion was beginning to experiment with a paywall. However, it doesn’t seem like this is a joke.

Who: Joe Garden, John Krewson, Katie Palmer, Seth Reiss, Will Tracy, moderated by Anderson Cooper
What: “The Onion: Celebrating 1,000 Issues of Prize-Worthy Journalism”
Where: Paley Center for Media
When: June 21, 2011
Thumbs: Up

After a landmark 1,000 issues chock-full of (fake) journalistic excellence, newspaper of fictitious record The Onion is launching a full-scale assault on the Pulitzer Prize Committee to demand an award of their own, in every possible category– including “public service.” To butter up the committee, an “independent” advocacy group is launching an initiative to send belligerent form letters to the “sick, allegedly on-the-take little cabal of excellence-rapers” that hand out the award.

There’s something about Memorial Day that kind of gets me down. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m spending the entire weekend reflecting on people who risked and sacrificed their very lives for the good of the country and the most exciting thing I did this week was go to a pretty good improv class. That’s why it’s weekends like these where I need something to remind myself that there are people more pathetic than me. Enter the tumblr Literally Unbelievable which has been going viral all morning! It’s a collection of Facebook postings from people who can’t tell that The Onion isn’t a real news source. I can feel my self confidence rising already!

The rise and fall of the “birthers,” America’s foremost conspiracy theory punchline, has been a veritable goldmine for the nation’s comedy industry. And as with all goldmines, people get possessive about who is encroaching on whose land. Earlier today, Bill Maher objected to The Onion stealing a joke about “afterbirthers” demanding to see the President’s placenta– a joke The Onion printed six months before Maher’s performance.

Today The New York Times admitted they made the mistake of treating a fake creation from The Onion as something legitimate. Last week the Times printed an article documenting the history of the squeaky-clean teen magazine Tiger Beat, and included a retrospective of past magazine covers. Unfortunately (or humorously depending on one’s perspective), in the collection they also included a parody cover created by The Onion, which featured President Obama.

“America’s Finest News Source,” The Onion, has had a bit of a field day with Vice President Joe Biden. And it’s been that way since day one, when The Onion reported Biden showing up at the inauguration with a long blonde ponytail. Later, writers suggested the vice president had been “quietly singing Pearl Jam’s ‘Even Flow’ during (a) security briefing.”

When IFC sent us screeners of the Onion News Network, I thought it would be pointless to review it. As I’ve made clear before, years of devoted Onion reading and watching meant that there was almost no chance I wasn’t going to like this show. However, it only took a few minutes into the first episode for me to realize that, not only did I already know how I’d feel about this show, most of our readers already would too. Really, if you don’t have time to read this review, you can just ask yourself this; If you went on the website right now and watched 20 minutes of ONN shorts, would you enjoy it? If the answer is yes, then you’re going to enjoy this show.

A few weeks ago, we got a look at the Onion News Network, the upcoming television spinoff of the satirical mainstay. Now, with the show set to premiere in just a few weeks and The New York Times reporting that one of their chief fake news rivals is busy saving the world or something, IFC has released the full scene that the image was from, now in moving picture form. So, yes, while we already knew that the show had a bit about Kim Jong Il playing Batman, we now know that that bit ends with his North Korean spokesmen doing a wonderful dance to “celebrate Dear Leader’s ascendancy to Batman.”

If The Onion is America’s Finest News Source, that would make The A.V. Club—the mostly serious, cultural arm of the paper—America’s Finest Critical Source. Yet the section made a rare misstep yesterday when they published a review of a book that the reviewer hadn’t read. He hadn’t read it because it hasn’t been published yet. In fact, the isn’t even finished yet.

Look, I love all things The Onion. You probably could have guessed that from my post entitled “The Onion Releases First Promo For Their New Series And It Looks All Sorts Of Awesome.” The folks over at IFC apparently noticed that as well and, sensing that this was a subject where I have next to zero journalistic integrity and that my unabashed fanboyism was thus perfectly suited to be used for their own dark purposes, they’ve rewarded me (and by extension, you) with an exclusive first look at the upcoming Onion News Network!

Most people recognize The Onion as the Peabody Award-winning satire machine that it is. Some people, however, don’t. Which is why we get a story like this every few months. Of course, it’s sometimes easy to mistake an Onion article for the real thing since the writers make sure to skew as close to their targets as possible. It also doesn’t hurt when real news outlets reprint the satirists’ work and decide not to let their readers know it’s a joke, as Fox Nation did today.

If you don’t watch the absolutely hilarious videos that The Onion puts online under the Onion News Network banner, then you are missing out. They’ve got every bit of the brilliance of the print version, as well as the having the images move and there being sound and stuff. Well, they’ve now released the a promo for their upcoming series on IFC, which is the first of two new television projects for the company (the other being a sports show on Comedy Central). As expected, the new series looks pretty darn great.

Everyone knows the August news cycle is a long slog for both newsmakers and news consumers. The now infamous Shark Week was borne from a desire to take advantage of the dog days, and in the last few years August has borne such national controversies as the Town Hall meeting, the Tea Party movement, and lately the ‘Ground Zero Mosque.’ Also, bed bugs, bulls, and dancing robots.

I’m not even going to bother with the label “this exists” because in a world where one frequently feels like the real news is straight out the The Onion it’s not all that surprising that an actual Onion story would be mistaken for the truth.

Yesterday, Google trends and Twitter had rumors flying that July 5, 2010 was the future date Dr. Emmett Brown set the DeLorean to in Back to the Future. Alas, turns out someone was merely having fun with photoshop. The Onion meanwhile, is taking its future reporting quite seriously.

Potentially good news for sports and comedy fanatics: Comedy Central just announced they’re picking up the pilot for The Onion Sports Network for a ten-episode run. The series is named after, and based on, the sports section of fake news pioneers The Onion. But will it be any good?

And you thought the teleprompter was bad. Now President Obama is apparently lip-synching his speeches. Kidding! This is not real. This is from the Onion. Obama not lip-synching is actually the funniest part. Video after the jump.

I long ago lost track of the number of times that I’ve described something, or someone, as sounding like something you’d read in the The Onion, such has been the state of the news cycle since June (remember the Beer Summit?). However, what you are about to read actually is from the Onion. It is a fake* op-ed piece penned by an imaginary* Rush Limbaugh.

I’m not even sure The Onion could make this stuff up. State-owned radio and television stations in Venezuela (as in, Hugo Chavez state-owned) are apparently reporting that the cause of last week’s devastating earthquake in Haiti was caused by “secret” U.S. “weapon of earthquakes.”