'The Onion' Wants To Save Us From Celebrity Gossip

By Emma G. Gallegos in Arts & Entertainment on Sep 22, 2015 4:36PM

Your new celebrity gossip source

The most trusted news website on the internet has launched a celebrity gossip site: The Onion launched StarWipe this week.

The best part of the site, dedicated to celebrities—"those most vulnerable members of society," it says—is that it doesn't have to make anything up. The most ridiculous quotes from the press release announcing its arrival come from straight from actual tabloids. It's like Reddit's r/NotTheOnion but for celebrity gossip. (And, technically, it is The Onion.) Here's a sample:

“I met a woman and her dog, and I loved her dog’s name. Funny enough, it was the name she had picked out if she had a girl, but she had boys, so she used it for her dog instead,” Laguna Beach’s Kristin Cavallari rambled on and on like that in an interview quoted by People, trying to change the topic of an already-unnecessary conversation to something so inane, this new website couldn’t possibly find anything in it to talk about. Still, as Cavallari would soon discover, not even a former reality star’s pointless, endless anecdote about some stranger’s dog is so fluffy or inconsequential that the website wouldn’t immediately jump on it, then add some snarky comments to fill its daily quota of bullshit.

Editor-in-chief Sean O'Neal explained to Esquire why its celebrity gossip site doesn't need to make anything up, like ClickHole:

"The thrust of the site is the sort of news reporting I've been doing for about eight years now over at The A.V. Club—with 'news' and 'reporting' in scare quotes, probably—but we'll also appropriate the tabloid tropes of your Peoples, your Us Weeklys, your TMZs, then approach them the same way The Onion and ClickHole look at world events and viral content. The difference is we don't have to make anything up, because gossip culture is already fake and ridiculous."

StarWipe says that celebrities should be "petrified" about its arrival on the scene. But the site's main target are tabloids like TMZ, People, Us Weekly and the public's bottomless appetite for celebrity blathering and controversy and slideshows.

So far, StarWipe has breathed a sigh of relief that General Hospital star Nancy Lee Grahn created a "race-related controversy on Twitter" to start the week off right. And it pointed out the broad overlap between the fan bases of Rihanna and Taylor Swift. It poked fun at Amy Poehler's #SmartGirlsAsk campaign. And it questioned what Kim Kardashian plans to do with her placenta.