[Reader-list] Everyone was delighted with spoof NY Times

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

Everyone was delighted with spoof NY Times

Ripan Kumar Biswas
Ripan.Biswas at yahoo.com

Like many other commuters, when I received one this morning from a
hawker at west 34th street, Herald Square, Manhattan just a few blocks
south of the Times headquarters, I was surprised at first as the New
York Times on November 12, 2008 with a headline "IRAQ WAR ENDS"
surprised commuters, many of us took the free copies thinking we were
legitimate.

Commuters nationwide were delighted to find out that while they were
sleeping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end. One
million two hundred thousands Papers were printed at six different
presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of
volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street. The14-page
"special edition" of the New York Times had everything like
International, National, New York, and Business sections, as well as
editorials, corrections, and a number of advertisements, including a
recall notice for all cars that run on gasoline.

Although the paper, an exact replica of The New York Times, was a
hoax, but many readers were pleased to imagine that it would be great
if it comes true. "It's all about how at this point; we need to push
harder than ever," said Bertha Suttner, one of the newspaper's
writers. "We've got to make sure Obama and all the other Democrats do
what we elected them to do. After eight, or maybe twenty-eight years
of hell, we need to start imagining heaven." According to the many
readers, it doesn't "imagine a liberal utopia" — just something better
than the conservative dystopia of the last eight years and described
the eight months of progressive support and pressure, culminating in
President-elect Obama's "Yes we REALLY can" speech. A liberal group
called the Yes Men, well known in the US for its practical jokes,
claimed responsibility for the elaborate prank.

Dated July 4 2009, and boasting the motto "All the news we hope to
print" in a twist on the daily's famous phrase "All the news that's
fit to print", the fake paper looks forward to the day the war ends,
and envisages a chain of events that would be manna from heaven for
American liberals. "IRAQ WAR ENDS," read the lead story headline,
while other pieces included an apology from the former secretary of
state Condoleezza Rice for lies Rice that the Bush administration had
known all along that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction
and the indictment of President Bush for high treason. It may not be
coincidental, but in an interview with CNN on November 12, 2008,
President George W. Bush said that he wanted people to know what it
was like to make some of the decisions he had to make but it conveyed
the wrong message. "I've had one of those presidencies where I've had
to make some tough calls, and I want people to know the truth about
what it was like sitting in the Oval Office, he said. In an another
interview with Bloomberg Television on July 3, 2008, Rice, however,
was proud of the U.S. decision to wage the Iraq war and insisted that
the world is not more dangerous than it was when Bush took office.

In one story ExxonMobil is taken into public ownership; while in
another evangelicals open the doors of their mega-churches to Iraqi
refugees. Articles in the paper announce dozens of new initiatives
including the establishment of national health care, a rebuilt
economy, progressive taxation, goals of progressive politics,
abolition of corporate lobbying, maximum wage for C.E.O.s, and
national oil fund to study climate change. In addition, the paper said
that notorious Guantanamo Bay, Cuba detention camp would be closed,
along with a network of secret C.I.A-run facilities in Eastern Europe,
Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

To make it more real, the fake paper misspelled Secretary of State
Rice's first name and chose the Independence Day of US. The people
behind the project wanted to experience what it would look like, and
feel like, to read headlines people really want to read and it's about
what's possible, if everyone thinks big and acts collectively.
According to the organizers, the election was a massive referendum on
change. There's a lot of hope in the air, but there's a lot of
uncertainty too. It's up to all now to make these headlines come true.
"It doesn't stop here as we gave Obama a mandate, but he'll need
mandate after mandate after mandate to do what we elected him to do,"
said Andy Bichlbaum, editor of the spoof New York Times. "To act
properly, he'll need a lot of support, and yes, a lot of pressure," he
added.

When Barack Obama takes office in January, propelled by the greatest
percentage of the popular vote by a Democratic presidential candidate
since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, his party has high hopes that it has a
mandate to push through the ambitious agenda Obama laid out in his
campaign.

Though the special edition itself had been produced by a number of
writers from various New York dailies, including a couple from the New
York Times itself, but it was evidently an expensive satire. The
project had taken about six months and had been funded by a large
number of small donors. And not all readers reacted favorably. "The
thing I disagree with is how they did it," said Eric Paul who was
taking coffee with me at Starbucks near Penn Station. "I'm all for
freedom of speech, but there should be some limit."

It was a brilliant prank! It looks like those of those headlines are
what the majority of Americans want to see under Barack Obama after he
takes power in January. The parody definitely has the fingerprints of
the social justice movement. But some readers became emotional.
According to them, this is really in bad taste and not funny at all.
It is one thing to do a spoof or a social commentary piece, but to put
a headline saying the Iraq War has ended is just going too far. People
are dying over there - this is not something to "spoof."

As the Times deserve its reputation as "the paper of record," there is
a history of spoofs and parodies of The Times. Probably the best-known
is one unveiled two months into the 1978 newspaper strike. A whole
cast of characters took part in that parody, including the journalist
Carl Bernstein, the author Christopher Cerf, the humorist Tony Hendra
and the Paris Review editor George Plimpton. In 1999, the British
business executive Richard Branson printed 100,000 copies of a parody
titled "I Can't Believe It's Not the New York Times." The Onion is an
American "fake news" organization. It features satirical articles
reporting on international, national, and local news as well as an
entertainment newspaper. In 1970, the infamous Bananer became the
first spoof to parody a non-Chimes publication: the Christian Reformed
Church's Banner periodical. For Chimes, the Bananer has been a source
of inspiration for subsequent parody projects and the newspaper
itself.

Stories of the spoof New York Times are fake, but not exactly funny,
not exactly cruel. They're wishful headlines about how great
everything would be if the country would adopt liberal policies under
the new administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

November 13, 2008, New York
Ripan Kumar Biswas is a freelance writer based in New York