In November, satirical newspaper The Onion won a bankruptcy auction to purchase Infowars, a website dedicated to hawking anti-government conspiracy theories. On Wednesday, however, a federal bankruptcy judge rejected the purchase on the grounds that the auction wasn’t conducted in a sufficiently transparent fashion, and didn’t produce as many proceeds as it could have. At stake in this case is the future control of Infowars, which was started by far-right commentator Alex Jones.
The site has spread false information and conspiracy theories about a wide range of subjects, including the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Depending on next steps, The Onion could still successfully complete its acquisition, Jones could find a way to effectively retain control of the site, or the trustee overseeing the case could decide on another option altogether. To make its bid, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, joined with family members of victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, who have been frequent targets of Infowars’s conspiracy theories.
The goal of the purchase, according to a press release in November, was “to end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor for good.”In a statement early Wednesday morning, Onion CEO Ben Collins reiterated th.
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