Ben Collins | |
|---|---|
 Collins in 2022 | |
| Education | Emerson College (BS) |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Awards | Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism |
Ben Collins is an American businessman and journalist from Massachusetts. He was a former reporter for the news division of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), and became the CEO of the media company Global Tetrahedron, which owns The Onion , in 2024. [1] [2]
Collins is from the U.S. state of Massachusetts. His mother is a librarian. [3] [4] He attended Emerson College between 2006 and 2010. [3] While enrolled at Emerson, he was a music columnist for The Berkeley Beacon , the college's student newspaper. [1] [3] During college, he was a roommate of Chris Hurst, with whom he co-hosted a radio show as an undergraduate. [1] [5]
Following his graduation from Emerson, Collins began his career at Slam before performing social media work for Hulu. [3] Following his time at Hulu, Collins became a news editor of Esquire in 2013, [3] [6] where he remained for a year until he was hired by The Daily Beast . [3]
Between 2014 and 2018, Collins worked in various roles for The Daily Beast as a senior news editor and technology reporter. [1] [4] While Collins was employed at The Daily Beast, Hurst's girlfriend Alison Parker was shot and killed on live television. [5] Though Collins had not met Parker, [5] the incident and its aftermath deeply affected him; he decided to pursue reporting about online conspiracy theories and the far right after that. [1] [3]
At The Daily Beast, Collins frequently reported alongside researcher Brandy Zadrozny, who had joined the publication in 2013. [4] When offered an opportunity to work at NBC News in March 2018, Collins accepted it on the condition that he would be allowed to bring Zadrozny along to join him. [1]
In 2018, Collins and Zadrozny departed The Daily Beast to join NBC News. [1] [4] Collins has received special recognition from the 2023 Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in Television Political Journalism. [7] [8]
In December 2022, following controversial comments Collins made on social media that NBC says ran afoul of its social media standards, NBC temporarily suspended Collins from covering Elon Musk and Twitter. [9] [10]
In April 2024, Collins was announced as the CEO of Global Tetrahedron, a company that has purchased the satirical website The Onion . Its name is a reference to a fictional company described in Onion publications. [2] The purchase originated from a post by Collins on Bluesky after news broke that then-owner G/O was looking to offload the magazine among other titles. [11] [12] On November 14, 2024, Collins won the assets of website InfoWars at auction with support of the families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. [13] The federal judge overseeing the bankruptcy case of Jones, Christopher Lopez, ordered an evidentiary hearing regarding the auction, saying "I’m going to figure out exactly what happened" and that "no one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction.” [14]
The Onion is an American digital media company and newspaper organization that publishes satirical articles on international, national, and local news. The company is based in Chicago but originated as a weekly print publication on August 29, 1988, in Madison, Wisconsin. The Onion began publishing online in early 1996. In 2007, they began publishing satirical news audio and video online as the Onion News Network. In 2013, The Onion stopped publishing its print edition and launched Onion Labs, an advertising agency. The Onion was then acquired three times, first by Univision in 2016, which later merged The Onion and its several other publications into those of Gizmodo Media Group. This unit was sold in 2019 to Great Hill Partners, forming a new company named G/O Media. G/O Media then sold The Onion in April 2024 to Global Tetrahedron, a firm newly created by former Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, which revived the print edition in August that year.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, often referred to simply as The Inquirer, is a daily newspaper headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Founded on June 1, 1829, The Philadelphia Inquirer is the third-longest continuously operating daily newspaper in the United States.
Alexander Emerick Jones is an American far-right radio show host and prominent conspiracy theorist. He hosts The Alex Jones Show from Austin, Texas, which is the longest-running online news and politics talk show, and was previously broadcast by the Genesis Communications Network across the United States via syndicated and internet radio. He is the founder of InfoWars and Banned.Video, websites that promote conspiracy theories and fake news.
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The A.V. Club is an online newspaper and entertainment website featuring reviews, interviews, and other articles that examine films, music, television, books, games, and other elements of pop-culture media. The A.V. Club was created in 1993 as a supplement to its satirical parent publication, The Onion. While it was a part of The Onion's 1996 website launch, The A.V. Club had minimal presence on the website at that point.
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Katherine Bear Tur is an American author, and broadcast journalist working as a correspondent for NBC News. Tur is an anchor for MSNBC, where since 2021 she has hosted Katy Tur Reports. She has also reported for the NBC news platforms Early Today, Today, NBC Nightly News, Meet the Press, and WNBC-TV, and for The Weather Channel.
8kun, previously called 8chan, Infinitechan or Infinitychan, is an imageboard website composed of user-created message boards. An owner moderates each board, with minimal interaction from site administration. The site has been linked to white supremacism, neo-Nazism, the alt-right, racism and antisemitism, hate crimes, and multiple mass shootings. The site has been known to host child pornography; as a result, it was filtered out from Google Search in 2015. Several of the site's boards played an active role in the Gamergate harassment campaign, encouraging Gamergate affiliates to frequent 8chan after 4chan banned the topic. 8chan is the origin and main center of activity of the discredited QAnon conspiracy theory.
Laura Elizabeth Loomer is an American far-right political activist, conspiracy theorist, and internet personality. She was the Republican nominee to represent Florida's 21st congressional district in the 2020 United States House of Representatives elections, losing to Democrat Lois Frankel. She also ran in the Republican primary for Florida's 11th congressional district in 2022, losing to incumbent Daniel Webster.
X, formerly Twitter, may suspend accounts, temporarily or permanently, from their social networking service. Suspensions of high-profile accounts often attract media attention, and X's use of suspensions has been controversial.
Jacob Alexander Wohl is an American far-right conspiracy theorist, fraudster, and convicted felon. Wohl and lobbyist Jack Burkman have been responsible for multiple unsuccessful plots to frame public figures for fictitious sexual assaults. The pair were allegedly behind plots in October 2018 against U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in April 2019 against 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, and in April 2020 against White House Coronavirus Task Force member Anthony Fauci.
G/O Media Inc. is an American media holding company that owns and operates the digital media outlets Kotaku, The Root, The Inventory, and Quartz.
Brandy Zadrozny is an American investigative journalist and reporter with NBC News who specializes in radicalization, extremism and disinformation on the Internet.
Since the movement's emergence in 2017, adherents of the QAnon far-right conspiracy theory have been involved in a number of controversial events, some of them violent, resulting in the filing of criminal charges and one conviction for terrorism.
Rahul Ligma is a fictional fired Twitter employee, a character played by one of a pair of amateur improvisational actors that pranked multiple major media outlets on October 28, 2022. Ligma, the fictional character's surname, is a reference to the Ligma joke. The spontaneous and intentionally transparent hoax was revealed the same day, after the initial news coverage triggered debate among real Twitter employees about whether or not expected mass layoffs had already started. The Rahul Ligma character next appeared in early November as a recently unemployed FTX employee in the Bahamas. On November 15, Elon Musk, the incoming CEO of Twitter, facetiously offered Ligma and his compatriot their (fictional) old jobs back, and posted a photograph taken with them at Twitter headquarters. Although at least one journalist had publicly apologized for their failure to fact check before reporting the news, several notable media outlets were still oblivious to the running joke, and reported the duo's firing and rehiring as actual news. In social media, the follow-up stunt was widely criticized for lack of sensitivity to actual Twitter employees who had lost their jobs. On November 23, news reports surfaced once again, this time reporting that the actor playing Daniel Johnson had in fact been hired by Twitter for the first time.