The Onion Apologizes for Quvenzhané Wallis Oscar Tweet; Ex-Staffers Slam Move

Citing a loss of editorial freedom, a few former editors of The Onion have criticized the satirical newspaper for its apology to Quvenzhané Wallis, the 9-year-old Oscar nominee targeted by an offensive tweet during Sunday night's Academy Awards telecast.

"‪It shows they don't have faith in the writers, or in their public. ‬It looks worse that they took [the tweet] down," one former Onion editor, Joe Garden, told BuzzFeed.

The Onion tweeted a message that referred to Wallis, the star of "Beasts of the Southern Wild" and Best Actress nominee, with a derogatory and vulgar word Sunday night. Though the tweet was deleted within an hour, the damage was done.

"Calling a 9 year old child a c-word in one of the biggest nights of her life was going too far even for the onion. Classless," one Twitter user responded.

"@TheOnion Unfollowing you," another said. "Your tweet about a 9-yr-old child was stunningly inappropriate. That's not satire or a joke. That's sick."

Steve Hannah, The Onion CEO, posted an apology on the site Monday.

"On behalf of The Onion, I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive — not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting," Hannah wrote. "No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire."

Now, former Onion staffers say the site shouldn't have deleted the tweet at all.

"My reaction was, 'It wasn't a great joke, but big deal,'" Garden told BuzzFeed. "I saw where they were going, and the commentary was about the media construct and the Oscar hype in general. But the tweet was shocking for the sake of shocking, but I think that [taking it down] was not the way to handle it."

Project X, a site run by several former Onion editors in collaboration with Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim," published a parody of Hannah's letter Monday.

"On behalf of Thing X, I'd like to offer the following public apology for everything we've ever done: 

I am sorry to the thousands of people who took offense when we suggested that water chestnuts were worse than the Killing Fields of Cambodia. The fact that I find their sickening, crunchy texture and utter lack of flavor personally disgusting, is irrelevant to the millions who died in that terrible tragedy," read the letter, signed "Steve Banannah,"

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