On May 18th, 2017, The Onion posted a piece titled “Hundreds Of Miniature Sean Hannitys Burst From Roger Ailes’ Corpse.” On June 1st, 2017 Sean Hannity took offense to said article, tweeting “What is wrong with the left that they think these sorts of things are funny?” He then proceeded to have a segment about the satire piece on his Fox News show, where he compared The Onion piece to Kathy Griffith’s very controversial and criticized photo shoot featuring the bloody decapitated head of Donald Trump.
The Twitter response to Hannity calling The Onion a tool of the left and attacking the publication were mostly that of mockery towards Hannity. The mocking ranged from referring to Hannity as a snowflake, to sarcasm, to calling Hannity a hypocrite. Twitter users also pointed out that The Onion is satire.
While most tweets were mocking, there were some tweets that supported Hannity and called out The Onion. Despite this, the response was overwhelmingly on the side of The Onion, with most twitter respondents finding Hannity to be taking an article from a satire publication far too seriously. The attitude of those disagreeing with Sean Hannity may be best summed up with one of their tweets, “@seanhannity Dude it’s The Onion.”
Click on the link to see the Twitter thread: The full Twitter thread