Beasts of the Southern Wild star and youngest-ever Best Actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis is a lovely little girl who shows plenty of signs of turning into a reliable talent and a charming presence on the awards-season publicity circuit. And for some reason, she became the target of some of the most unpleasant jokes both during last night’s Academy Awards and in the commentary about them.

Seth MacFarlane cracked that “to give you an idea of how young she is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too young for Clooney.” It was a line that could have been at Clooney’s expense, if it hadn’t seemed so congratulatory—both MacFarlane and Clooney have a tendency to date much younger women. And as I wrote earlier today, MacFarlane immediately defused any sense that he was going after Clooney by tossing him a mini-bottle. Mega-stars, it seems, must be protected from any hurt feelings or criticism, but little girls? Not so much. Things got worse later in the evening when the Onion’s twitter feed Tweeted, and subsequently deleted “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a c—, right? #Oscars2013.” It was jarring and appalling to see that kind of language directed at a nine-year old girl, even if there’s a world where the concept of the joke could have been funny. Suggesting that a little girl who carries purses shaped like puppies and has a habit of flexing adorably on the red carpet or when the camera comes to her is secretly a Machiavellian schemer or a diva is a reasonable joke to me, and a similar schtick was a long-running and successful plot point on 30 Rock. It even could have been a riff on the irrational haterade directed actresses like Anne Hathaway. But the Onion’s choice of sexual, nasty language blew up that possibility: it was programming to the character length, not the actual quality of the gag.

To the publication’s credit, the Onion appears to have realized this. The company’s CEO, Steve Hannah, just published a Facebook post asking for Wallis’ forgiveness:

I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting. No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire. The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again.In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible. Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.

But beyond the Onion’s apology, it’s worth thinking more deeply about why the attempts at satire aimed at Wallis went so badly last night.
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I wrote about this a bit yesterday in my review of House of Cards, but, while I respect the work of folks at MSNBC, I kind of think that the best way to take on cable news is not to go high-minded and triumphal a la The Newsroom, but savage and ridiculous. Fortunately, it sounds like Amazon, as part of their plans to expand into original programming* is planning to oblige me:

Amazon Studios has landed another big-name actor for one of its first six comedy pilots. I’ve learned that Jeffrey Tambor is set to star in The Onion Presents: The News. The project, from The Onion’s Will Graham & Dan Mirk (The Onion News Network, The Onion Sportsdome), is described as a fast-paced scripted comedy set behind the scenes of The Onion News Network that shows just how far journalists will go to stay at the top of their game. Tambor will play David Everett, ONN’s oldest and most respected news anchor. He is intellectual, highly ambitious, cutthroat and insecure as he believes his job is being threatened by the younger Cameron, whom David detests.

Tambor was actually quite good in Next Caller, a show NBC put into production about the employees of a satellite radio station that starred Dane Cook. The pilot itself was a little bit heavy on the wacky, and Cook’s appeal will always be limited to me. But Tambor, as the head of the station, embraced the ludicrousness of his position, which required him to program to niche audiences that ranged from the bros who tuned in to Cook’s show to people who really just wanted to listen to saucy Catholic nuns. And while it’s not as if the projects come from the same creators, or if Tambor is acting out his own ideas about media, his strong suit as an actor has always been characters who maintain a level of wounded dignity entirely inappropriate to their circumstances. That’s a nice set of skills to take to cable news as a subject, and goodness knows The Onion has a genius for finding examples of gaps and disjuncts between the reality of scenarios and the ways people comport themselves during them.

*Which includes an original series by Garry Trudeau about Congressmen sharing a rowhouse in Washington, for which I cannot wait.

Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that President Obama voiced his belief that gay and lesbian couples deserve equal marriage rights today in part because Vice President Joe Biden said as much over the weekend before the administration tried to take back his comments, suggesting they were some sort of gaffe. “Shirtless, drunk-with-power Joe Biden spotted on roof of Naval Observatory, shouting commands at pedestrians below,” Washington observer Delrayser joked on Twitter.

When Biden was tapped as President Obama’s vice presidential candidate in 2008, the reasons were obvious: he was an older, blindingly white Senator with a strong, long list of credentials including helping to torpedo Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, an event that took place the year before Obama entered Harvard Law School. His penchant for gaffes—he had previously described Obama as “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”—was acknowledged and considered a worthwhile risk given the other qualities he brought to the ticket.

And instead of being an enormous liability, Biden’s volubility became something of a meme. He made the rounds at Inaugural Balls quoting Seamus Heaney. To The Onion, he was a gold mine. The fake newspaper churned out stories about Biden washing a Trans Am shirtless, or getting banned from Dave and Buster’s, or fleeing to Mexico. Biden was apparently aware and appreciative of the stories. The Vice President was a perfect subject of cultural jokes, a tendency that couldn’t have been predicted (ditto for the sudden coolness of Hillary Clinton), but that in retrospect is very, very useful for taking heat off a president accused of being a celebrity and a lightweight. The Vice President is never supposed to overshadow the President, but in matters light and weighty alike, Biden does seem to have created space for Obama.

And so there’s something fitting and hilarious about the fact that Biden is headed to Jeopardy, off to be his likable self for a generation of viewers who weren’t going to be impressed by President Obama Slow Jamming the News with Jimmy Fallon and the roots. Part of this administration’s appeal has been its ability to bridge generations, but whether your thing is trivia games or mic drops, Biden and Obama’s collective arrival at this point is a reminder that we don’t, and shouldn’t, have to wait for generational turnover to see stances, policies, and lives change.

Yesterday, The Onion caught a tremendous amount of flack for tweeting, as a kickoff to a longer Twitter narrative related to a story about a hostage-taking scenario in Congress (riffing, of course, on the debt ceiling debate), “BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building.” The publication followed that tweet almost immediately with another that was a clear joke, “BREAKING: Capitol building being evacuated. 12 children held hostage by group of armed congressmen. #CongressHostage,” but the initial tweet had already been dramatically amplified beyond the account’s followers and had people questioning whether real violence was underway.

So did The Onion go too far with the first tweet? It’s an interesting question that’s the result of a collision with two sets of norms: first, The Onion expecting that everyone will know that anything comes out under the publication’s name is a joke; second is the assumption that in the case of grave tragedy, everyone breaks character to respond to it. The latter norm is, I think, stronger, and in the age of Twitter, we haven’t really accounted for the few exceptions to that rule. I can’t think of a single situation where The Onion’s broken character. I mean, they did the September 11 attacks brilliantly, but they did them by digging deep and getting back to the core of what had made the site great, and pulling approximately no punches. This story about a Muslim kid getting bullied on the playground is heartbreakingly predictive and really damning, as was this savaging of commercial exploitation of the attacks.

So in a way, I appreciate The Onion’s resolute willingness to go a little too far in the service of what was a fairly sharp story. But I think they should have included a link to the actual story. If you’re playing by a slightly tweaked set of rules from everyone else, it doesn’t hurt to reaffirm that, especially when touching on sensitive ground in a medium that encourages misinterpretation and often loses context in the process.