Despite its reputation, there are still readers who can't read a joke and mistake The Onion stories for real news, and The Onion's office receives frequent calls and e-mails with complaints as a result. A large bulletin board in the paper's main editing room features letters from readers, copies of e-mails, and complaints and protests. These include a letter from the publisher of the book Our Century of Ignorance, who reflects that many readers complained that The Onion's promise of a free globe with the book turned out to be a scam. There was also a warning letter from the White House protesting the unauthorized misappropriation of the presidential seal on The Onion's website. The Onion invoked the First Amendment to continue to use the presidential seal, and the White House did not follow through on the warning. A story "Pope puts 3 more human glands on condemnation list" drew protests from the Vatican, and in 2002, the Beijing Evening News reported an Onion fake story as real, saying that the U.S. Congress was threatening to leave Washington, D.C., and relocate elsewhere unless the government did as they demanded and converted the Capitol's vaults into a recyclable style. recyclable. Another time, a story about "Billionaire Mark Cuban Buys All-American Sports Club" led to a panicked phone call from a sports fan. Even more ludicrous was the time The Onion reported that "a mall shooting victim refused to die in an overly-feminine candle store and crawled into the adjacent Champion Sporting Goods store with sheer determination before collapsing from blood loss." The Champion Sports chain went so far as to call the editorial board specifically to offer to reward the shooting victim mentioned in the story who was recovering in the hospital. In June of this year, a worker called in to fix the air conditioner in his office saw an old Onion newspaper framed up and adorning the wall that said, "The earth has been plunged into darkness since the transfer of the North American continent." This gullible worker scratched his head and asked, "Ah, when did that happen? Why don't I have the slightest recollection of it?"

People's Daily, a subsidiary of People's Daily, recently (Nov. 27, 2012) made another big joke by parodying an Onion story about Kim Jong-ja in People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive for 2012." 2012" (Sexiest Man Alive for 2012), and made a big report on Kim Jong-un's selection. It also translated the original article into Chinese with 55 photos of Kim Jong-un to make a special feature. Subsequently, the People's Daily's embarrassing story was reported by a number of foreign media outlets, and was reduced to a laughing stock around the world. The Onion News also responded to its original article, saying "People's Daily is its proud subsidiary."

August 13, the official media reported fake news as real for several days: Xinhua People's Daily, NetEase, Phoenix and others reprinted a compilation of an international online article saying that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos accidentally clicked the wrong mouse to put the Washington Post in his cart, and that he didn't realize that he'd spent $250 million to buy it until after he was notified by an Express card. International Online's source was the New Yorker's Onion story, The Borowitz Report. International Online has pulled the story, and Xinhua has once again deleted the posting - just the day before it had a photo story about screenshots from a pornographic movie as if it were a major U.S. scandal.