Something wicked and unholy is happening at UNC and, for once, it has nothing to do with Chancellor Lee Roberts and the Board of Trustees. Whooping cough has been spreading, soon-to-be graduates' wings are spreading, Chase Dining Hall strawberry cream cheese has been spreading. And, now, misinformation is spreading, thanks to The Oh Well.
Mostly platforming on Instagram and its website, The Oh Well proclaims itself to be “a gateway into the latest UNC news.” But through investigation and in-depth probing of their stories, I have discovered that their content is entirely fabricated, exaggerated and made-up. It operates under false journalistic integrity and is purposely misleading readers through clickbait and humorous headlines.
As an avid watcher of Fox News and a subscriber of the New York Post, I consume the “real” news everyday — it’s easy for me to unearth the fake stuff. Though I know not everyone has this talent and knowledge, it is astonishing that absolutely no one has pointed this out yet. Why is nobody in their comment sections questioning these obviously fake headlines? Why is nobody challenging the clearly photoshopped pictures?
People send me Oh Well posts with the crying laughing emoji and my quick wit and critical thinking skills scrutinize the headlines’ validity. If people want to laugh, they’re better off reading content like The Onion’s. Fake news and misinformation like this is not a laughing matter.
To provide evidence for this sure-to-be ground-breaking exposé, I have combed through various Oh Well stories and fact-checked them thoroughly. For starters, their long-running story that the Old Well now houses a Coke machine is blatantly false. I’ve been to the Well multiple times and have found the same water fountain that always subtly smells of Wolfpack feces. A quick Google search found that UNC basketball actually did not hire a smaller, angrier Hubert Davis. We still have the tall and mildly angry Davis. And Timothée Chalamet was never being considered alongside Bill Belichick for UNC football head coach.
Further, they claimed that Meantime Coffee Co. was opening in 85 new locations throughout Chapel Hill. Well, guess what? It’s not! Right now it only has two main locations, and of course one of them is in the liberal, woke Campus Y. They even misled readers with the headline “UNC renames Hamilton Hall to Hamilton Hall, honors musically inclined Founding Father.” I don’t need to be in Oh Well headquarters, the room where it happened, to understand that they invented this out of thin air for likes and views.
The Oh Well’s deception isn’t anything new. They thought they could trick its readers — who probably started growing suspicious — by changing their name from its previous title “The Onyen” to “The Oh Well.” But I’m not fooled. I’m no sheep. I am a free thinker, an intellectualist. I’ve woken up. I’ve realized that this is all a matrix. Society has created systems deliberately designed to enslave and deceive. The Oh Well is part of this matrix, which is now fully attacking us.
Compared to the perfection of The Daily Tar Heel and the never-biased content on the Opinion Desk, The Oh Well is tarnishing the credibility of all Chapel Hill media and news outlets. The delicate, impressionable minds of UNC students are being corrupted by this account, and it’s time to take action. To counter their spread of misinformation, it’s time to start spreading the fact that we’ve found out what they truly are: frauds.
My earth-shattering revelation about this news outlet further exemplifies that media literacy is dead. But, at the end of the day, there are always going to be idiots out there who don’t understand what they’re reading. There are always going to be fools raising hell about something going right over their heads. Those saps cannot be helped — all we can do is appreciate that we are not those ninnies and simply say, "oh well."
