“We’re Screwed,” Warns “Special Edition” of New York Post
Real news; fake paper
The newspaper was fake, but the message was real. The culture-jamming group The Yes Men and a coalition of activists created a fake version of the New York Post this week, and 2,000 volunteers distributed it through New York City to spread the news: “We’re Screwed.” The paper was meant to be a call to action on climate change.
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The most alarming thing about the whole episode: the news came from an official New York City report – everything in the paper was true. That report received little attention when it was released in February.
“Some of the stories that we exposed in it have been picked up by the mainstream media,” said Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum in an interview with the Huffington Post. “We outline the terrible things that will happen. And a couple of media outlets actually took that up and reported it, many months after the study was completed. In February, when the study was released, nobody covered it. And it's actually pretty big news. So we broke that story.”
The paper included original investigative reporting too. One article ("Carbon counter counts New Yorkers as fools") revealed that Deutsche Bank, which put up a giant “carbon counter” in Manhattan, has recently begun trading in coal.
"This could be, and should be, a real New York Post," Bichlbaum said. "Climate change is the biggest threat civilization has ever faced, and it should be in the headlines of every paper, every day until we solve the problem." Bichlbaum said it took them a month to put together the fake NY Post, relying on the experience they gained from putting out a fake New York Times several months ago.
Following the newspaper’s release, the Yes Men held a press conference to promote the SurvivaBall, a self-heating, self-cooling, self-powered inflatable pod meant to protect the wearer from climate catastrophes – like a “gated community for one,” its Web site says.
-- Suzanne Bopp
