Iraq War Ends! Bush To Face High Treason Charge! NOT! (yet)

The war in Iraq is over! Bush to face high treason charges, Universities to be Free, according to the gloriously fake New York Times. A team of people involved in the elaborate hoax distributed 200,000 copies of the paper - issue date July 4, 2009 - in locations throughout Manhattan this morning. I got one when I went to get coffee this morning. Gawker reports that the hoax is the work of The Yes Men, whose website leads to BecauseWeWantIt.org.

The spoof isn't as well-written or funny as The Onion or The Borowitz Report, and the joke soon wears thin. But it certainly is an ambitious project, and a strange one. My favorite headline in the fake business section declares: “Public Relations Industry Forecasts a Series of Massive Layoffs.”

"We want to maintain maximum mystery around this, for as long as possible - at least for a couple of days." said a message from the group to collaborators. Silly people! Every blogger and person with a Facebook site hopes for a scoop! Nothing like this is going to stay secret for a couple of hours, let along a couple of days.

The hoaxsters went to the trouble of creating a companion website, www.nytimes-se.com where servers are apparently overloaded, and to print all the copies, which had to be expensive.

To their credit, the real NY Times has gamely tried to exhibit a sense of humor.

what a delicious spoof...timed precisely one week after newspapers FLEW off the press with news of the historic US presidential election. If anybody wants to recycle their copy - please let me know :) 200,000 hard copies of anything is a monumental undertaking! Bravo to the imagination.

If you haven't already seen it, I highly recommend their 2003 movie "The Yes Men" which details their elaborate, revealing and delightful pranks on the WTO and other organizations.

Good for them!

What a genius idea. I wonder how much all this cost them?