I was very, very excited when it was first announced that The Onion was going to be buying InfoWars. But it looks like I’ll have to put a lid on that excitement for now, because a judge has just rejected the bid on procedural and transparency grounds. The door isn’t closed on the Onion folks eventually getting their hands on it, but for now it’s back to the drawing board.
“I don’t think it’s enough money,” Lopez said in a late-night ruling from the bench in a Houston court. “I’m going to not approve the sale.”
It was not immediately clear whether there would be a new auction in which The Onion could bid again for Jones’ assets. Lopez said he would leave the decision about what to do next in the hands of the trustee, Christopher Murray, who had overseen the auction.
The judge said Murray had acted in good faith in running the auction in which The Onion’s parent company initially appeared to prevail, but he said the trustee did not run a transparent process and should have given a rival bidder associated with Jones another chance to improve its bid.
“I think you’ve got to go out and try to get every dollar,” Lopez said. “I think that the process fell down.”
The ruling dashed, at least for now, Global Tetrahedron’s plans to take over Infowars and radically shift its content from anti-government conspiracy theories to satirical humor. Instead, Jones can continue operating his far-right media business as he has for decades.
I understand the focus on money, because that’s how these sorts of cases generally should work. And the Judge did also make it clear that the rival bid wasn’t worth enough, which is nice, I guess. But I’m bothered by the idea that the pursuit of pure cash, even if it’s going to a good place, trumps the will of the very people who would ultimately be benefiting from it. Unless I’ve missed something huge, I haven’t heard a peep from any Sandy Hook families who would like for Alex Jones to continue being Alex Jones.
Yes, my concerns are more moral than legal, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Giving the wants of the victimized more weight than those of the guilty in a case like this one feels like the right thing to do, not to mention that a company associated with Jones shouldn’t be able to do an end-run around the system and just buy all his stuff back for him in the first place. That strikes me as a bug in the system, not a feature of it.