Dear Editor,
Hope you are doing well and thanks for publishing my previous write-ups.
This is an article titled "Everyone was delighted with spoof NY Times". I will be highly honoured if you publish this article. I apprecite your time to read this article.
Thanks
Have a nice time
With Best Regards
Ripan Kumar Biswas
New York, U.S.A
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Everyone was delighted with spoof NY Times 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 |
