Bobbie Battista used to be a newsreader on CNN, high-profile enough to warrant being occasionally lampooned by Saturday Night Live. Now she does the same job for the Onion News Network.
“Odd jobs always seem to find me,” Ms. Battista said in a telephone interview from Atlanta, where she lives and where she hosted “Talk Back Live,” the CNN viewer-participation program.
Ms. Battista said she initially had qualms about how joining The Onion would be perceived by former colleagues.
“It occurred to me that some would say, ‘Oh, how the mighty have fallen,’ ” she said. “I thought about that, but I said, ‘Hey, why not?’ ” She also considered her (low) opinion of the state of cable news today and saw that the space between real and fake news was shrinking.
“You watch the news today, and you don’t know what is real,” she said. “When I was doing newscasts at CNN, people would come up to me and say, ‘That story can’t be real.’ Now the lines are really getting blurred.” She mentioned a recent segment she saw about “lingerie football” on a cable news show. “My mouth was hanging open. How does this belong on the news?”
Ms. Battista’s work for The Onion is not a full-time job. She will visit New York a couple of times a year to tape segments; her second trip will be in August.
Unlike Comedy Central’s “Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” in which the correspondents appear to be in on the joke, the effect the producers of The Onion videos seek is full-on earnestness from its anchors.
“We always like to make what we do as much like real news as possible,” said Will Graham, the executive producer of The Onion News Network. “The more plausible it is, the funnier it is.”
Ms. Battista said that wasn’t what she expected. “That was very hard, I originally thought it would be nice to give a really sarcastic delivery,” she said. “But they wanted it with seriousness and gravitas.
“It is so hard not to crack up. There were many takes.”
Some of her stories have included:
Despondex, a drug for those who are too happy — “a huge step forward in the battle against exuberance,” she deadpans into the camera; Franz Kafka International Airport ranking last in customer satisfaction (the average delay is 31 hours longer than the next worse airport); and the discovery of the fossilized remains of the sexually predatory dinosaur (“a pervatasaurus”).