Digital media

The Onion wins auction to take control of Alex Jones’s Infowars

Author: Kim Bellware Source: The Washington Post

November 14, 2024 at 10:40

The Onion wins auction to take control of Alex Jones’s Infowars

The conspiracy theorist was forced to sell the site and other assets in an auction to pay roughly $1.5 billion in damages for claiming the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax.

The fate of far-right website Infowars will be controlled by the Onion after the satirical news site emerged as the winning bidder of Wednesday’s private auction of the media company founded by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Infowars and its property are among the personal assets Jones was forced to sell in a court-ordered auction after a bankruptcy judge in June sought to compel Jones to pay the roughly $1.5 billion in damages he owes for claiming the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.

Families who filed the Connecticut-based defamation lawsuit against Jones agreed to accept a smaller payout to increase the overall value of the Onion’s bid, which enabled its success, according to a Thursday statement from the families’ lawyers.

The auction win gives the Onion control of Infowars’ website, archive, mailing list and production equipment, among other assets, ending Jones’s control of the media company after 25 years.

“We were told this outcome would be nearly impossible, but we are no strangers to impossible fights. The world needs to see that having a platform does not mean you are above accountability — the dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” Sandy Hook parent Robbie Parker said in a statement. Parker’s 6-year-old daughter, Emilie, was among the 20 children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting.

The Onion’s takeover of Infowars comes with a multiyear agreement with the nonprofit group Everytown for Gun Safety, which will serve as the exclusive advertiser during the Onion-led relaunch of Infowars.

“The Onion is proud to acquire Infowars, and we look forward to continuing its storied tradition of scaring the site’s users with lies until they fork over their cold, hard cash,” Onion CEO Ben Collins said in a statement.

Jones railed against the news on an emergency broadcast of his show Thursday morning, blaming Democrats for his legal troubles and calling the sealed bidding process “rigged.” Jones acknowledged he was aware that the Sandy Hook families’ expressed goal was not to take his money, but to shut him down.

As Jones warned that his show could be shut down at any moment, he assured his audience that “there is a backup studio in the Alex Jones network.”

The sum for the winning bid was not immediately disclosed. On his show Thursday, Jones said the court-appointed trustee overseeing the auction would only reveal that the winning bid was “competitive.”

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (Jim Bourg/Reuters)

Jones had openly pinned his hopes on various right-wing figures, such Donald Trump ally Roger Stone, thwarting efforts by groups not aligned with Jones to acquire his company. Stone and the Onion had been floated as interested parties, along with the progressive media watchdog Media Matters for America.

“Getting under the hood of how they make these stories is tremendously valuable,” said Media Matters president Angelo Carusone, whose organization has long monitored the spread of Infowars stories.

He said even Jones’s detractors acknowledge the relevance and influence of Infowars’ reach, noting that Stone on Wednesday afternoon used Jones’s show to break the news that Trump had picked former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence.

“We just got a lesson in the big asymmetry in the media landscape,” Carusone added, referring to the outsize role that nontraditional media played in the presidential election. “How they measure relevance has to be updated.”

The auction of Infowars closes part of a more than decade-long saga that began when Jones used the platform to spread lies about the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six adults.

Jones repeatedly called the shooting a “hoax” meant to give cover to a conspiracy to dismantle gun rights, and insisted grieving family members were “crisis actors.” Sandy Hook families sued Jones for defamation in a pair of Texas- and Connecticut-based lawsuits.

Parents of the slain children testified at the 2022 defamation trial in Connecticut, including Jacqueline Barden, who said she and her husband received letters from people who said they had urinated on the grave of her 7-year-old son, Daniel, who was killed in the shooting. Another letter writer embracing Jones’s hoax claims threatened to dig up Daniel’s grave to prove he never existed, according to Barden’s testimony.

Chris Mattei, attorney for the Connecticut plaintiffs, hailed the auction outcome as a win for the Sandy Hook families in their fight to hold Jones accountable.

“After surviving unimaginable loss with courage and integrity, they rejected Jones’ hollow offers for allegedly more money if they would only let him stay on the air because doing so would have put other families in harm’s way,” Mattei said in a statement.