From the Onion brief: > At bottom, parody functions by catering to a reasonable reader -- one who can tell (even after being tricked at first) that the parody

From the Onion brief: > At bottom, parody functions by catering to a reasonable reader -- one who can tell (even after being tricked at first) that the parody is not real. If most readers of parody didn't live up to this robust standard, then there would be nothing funny about the Chinese government believing that a pudgy dictator like Kim Jong-un was the sexiest man on Earth. Everyone would just agree that it was perfectly reasonable for them to be taken in by the headline. > The law turns on the same reasonable-person construct. The reasonable-reader test gauges whether a statement can reasonably be interpreted as stating actual facts, thereby ensuring that neither the least humorous nor the most credulous audience dictates the boundaries of protected speech.... see also Golb v. Att'y Gen. of N.Y., 870 F.3d 89, 102 (2d Cir. 2017) ("[A] parody enjoys First Amendment protection notwithstanding that not everybody will get the joke.") I'm curious whether drawing any degree of public attention to the "reasonable-reader construct" will result in more nuanced discussion of misinformation/"fake news" than we normally get (in America). The assumption seems often to be that the reader is always most likely an unreasonable reader, and that the solution to the problem is to accommodate every information stream to unreasonable reading habits, rather than intervening in the problem of widespread credulity (if that is indeed the problem) itself.