Satire

In my long-running correspondence with my uncle from about 1998-2018, he would occasionally send me articles from The Onion that he thought were real news items.  Though that publication did make fun of liberal excesses at times, when it was political at all it mostly skewered cultural conservatives. It was pretty good at being neither, just having an appreciation of the silly and absurd as it played out in front of them.  I was irritated and sometimes even offended by them, but I did find them often funny. They did drift over time into being merely partisan, but that's another story.

My uncle was in no way a stupid man. He was an engineer trained at Northeastern after WWII, made enough money to retire in his fifties, and was a Mensa officer in Northern California; once he started volunteering at Habitat for Humanity he was very quickly put in charge of large multiple-dwelling projects in foreign countries, and his men's breakfast group in San Luis Obispo in his last decade was mostly retired Cal Poly professors. Yet he fell for these things repeatedly, and would ask me in outrage "How can you justify this current idiocy from conservatives?" 

Look, I have fallen for a few satire news items myself over the years.  It's embarrassing, but it happens.

The key item here is that no one thought it was necessary to correct this matter by trying to regulate the content of The Onion.  If you got fooled, that was on you.