Area man mistakes Onion story for reality

Hapless antiabortion blogger's humiliation spans globe thanks to amazing new "World Wide Web."

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: The Onion, Rebecca Traister, Life

July 14, 2006 | It's the stuff of webby fantasy and urban legend: a reader who takes an Onion story seriously. Last week, a speedy and vicious blogosphere watched its collective wet dream made real when "Pete," proprietor of antiabortion blog March Together for Life, posted "Murder Without Conscience," a furious excoriation of a 7-year-old fake column in the Onion titled "I'm Totally Psyched About This Abortion!" [Ed. Note: The original "Murder Without Conscience" entry has been altered since its publication and now includes some graphic images.]

The Onion is a satirical newspaper founded in 1988 by University of Wisconsin students and is these days published weekly from New York. The piece that inspired Pete's July 6 extended smack-down was a 1999 Op-Ed by fictional columnist "Caroline Weber." Pete did not realize that the Onion traffics in satire, and that the piece was a send-up of the notion that pro-choice activists are actually "pro-abortion." Weber's outrageous claims that she "seriously cannot wait for all the hemorrhaging and the uterine contractions" and that "this abortion is going to be so amazing" did not tip off Pete. In an utterly unironic retort, he cited lines like, "It wasn't until now that I was lucky enough to be pregnant with a child I had no means to support," and "I just know it's going to be the best non-anesthetized invasive uterine surgery ever!" to illustrate his disgust with the author.

On his blog, Pete expressed his rage at Weber's claim that if her HMO hadn't bowed to pressure not to cover her oral contraceptives, she never would have gotten pregnant to begin with. "Sorry ma'am," Pete responded. "If you hadn't had sex you wouldn't have gotten pregnant, it's not the HMO's fault for not supporting your promiscuity while not married." And in case it wasn't already clear where he stood on the issue of satirical abortion, Pete added, "Miss Weber, you have killed your child, which you admit is a baby/human being, intentionally. That does make you an admitted murderer."

Remarkably, this isn't the first time that an Onion parody has been treated as straight news. In 2002, China's Beijing Evening News reported that members of the United States Congress were threatening to move operations from Washington D.C. to Memphis, Tenn., because the shabbiness of the Capitol building created "problems attracting top talent." A Chinese reporter had picked up the story wholesale from the Onion and filed it as his own. It was funny.

But 2002 was eons ago. Before everyone had a blog, and before viral linkage meant that a private humiliation, like not getting a joke, could become an instant spectacle that spread like a nasty and very noticeable rash. Reached by phone at his Virginia home a week after his initial post about the Onion story, Pete said, "You write some article off the cuff and throw it out there and you never know what's going to happen. The next thing I know there are people calling me from all over the world and telling me what an idiot I am!" It was surely the most public of embarrassments, an example of how the intersection of varied voices and ideologies and sensibilities in the brutal wild West of the new, new blogosphere can go tragically wrong. Or right. Depending on your sense of humor.

Pete's sense of humor, at least in conversation, was surprisingly -- and unnervingly -- unrelenting. He did ask that Salon not print his last name or his hometown given the threats his family has been receiving (his full name has been revealed on other sites), but the 45-year-old Internet communications consultant chortled steadily throughout an hour-long phone interview. "I've pretty much been laughing off the whole thing," he said. "When thousands and thousands of people are coming after you, if you took it seriously, you'd have a heart attack."

Indeed, it wasn't long after his first post that some helpful online critics pointed out to Pete that he had been tilting at windmills. "There were 1,400 comments on the blog," said Pete. "A bunch of them [were from people] wishing that I had been aborted, and who used lots of curse words -- probably tens of thousands of curse words." The comments, which have now been removed from March Together for Life but as of Thursday could still be found on some archived sites, included an impressive array of epithets directed at Pete, including "Dumbshit," "Asshat" and "Honkknob," and, perhaps not unreasonably, an equally impressive host of insults to Pete's intelligence. Pete also said he received more than a dozen calls at home, mostly from heavy breathers.

Four days after his initial Onion entry, Pete posted a follow-up, acknowledging that he now understood that the piece had been a joke. "Needless to say, a few people wanted to let me know that I was a dolt for thinking that her article was real," Pete wrote. "As a matter of fact, call me a dolt, because in the beginning I really did think it was real. Why? Because I meet women like her in the field all the time. Anyway, I wrote the blog in a way that was meant to point out how psychotic the pro-abortion movement is."

Next page: Pete wasn't ready to let the Onion go without a fight