Two weeks ago, the New York Times announced that American military action in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end. If you missed this piece of breaking news while watching Fox and Friends, or didn’t catch it in your RSS news feed, there’s good reason: this wasn’t the old Gray Lady announcing the end of the war, that venerable one-time home of fabulist Jayson Blair, the allegedly leftist mouthpiece that gave safe harbor to WMD cheerleader Judith Miller. Instead the news was broken by the New York Times Special Edition, a mock recreation by a grassroots army comprised of activist groups and individuals.

Responses to the paper were mixed. The popular narratives attempted to parse the project as either a would-be Onion-esque parody, or as a throwback to ‘60s merry pranksterism, one rendered moot by the recent election of a center-right Democrat to President of the United States. Bloggers drilled into the minutiae, pointing out that the faux-Lady didn’t follow the New York Times’ style book or house typography, and obsessing over minor spelling errors. The Times‘ response was one of official bemusement, while media outlets ranging from Fox News to Gawker glibly dismissed the project’s content as a “liberal wishlist”.

The paper was distributed by volunteers on the streets of New York and other major American cities on November 12th. Quickly after its release, activist group The Yes Men claimed sole credit for the paper, a point contested by others involved (the group later released a long, if incomplete, list of contributing groups). Activist and author Anne Elizabeth Moore was intimately involved in the production of the paper, but left five weeks before its release due to disagreements over its direction. As she explains in this interview with Is Greater Than, the utopian New York Times had as tortured a birth as any major daily newspaper.

PMD: How did you get involved with the fake New York Times project?

AEM: Steve Lambert, who sort of started the whole discussion, invited me, originally to contribute. We had been working on stuff together for awhile beforehand–the AAAFFF–and had developed a really good solid collaboration. He asked me to contribute to the paper, and I was like, “uh, but who’s going to edit?” There was this sense that, like, papers come together sort of magically. I was like, that’s not the way it works. How it works is with someone really dedicated to getting that paper out the door needs to do that. And with something like this, where all the different lies have to come together to form a unique whole that is still believable, well, it was going to take some serious effort. So I did it.

PMD:What was the original concept for the project, and in what ways did the finished product differ from it either in tone or intention?

Photo by Flickr user ConwayL

AEM: Originally, we’d agreed that it would be an anonymous project, that no one would take credit for it, because that’s where the power in this was: in the sense that it had genuinely come from an unseen force of “the people”. I think that’s still a really powerful idea that no one’s really explored artistically, and that’s what’s sort of important for me to put out there. ‘Cause the project turned out to be, ‘a couple guys in New York pulled some crazy prank,’–that’s sort of inconsequential in my mind. At least as activism, although also as art. How does that shift any power structures or misconform to any notions of how the world operates? And there’s another way.

Also, of course, the paper itself changed after I left the project. A ton of stuff was cut–much of it the most engaged critical stuff. Maybe stuff that took on the Times too closely, out of fear, I don’t know. Perhaps coincidentally, most content by female contributors was cut. (Because you know, I was making my ideal paper, and my ideal paper addresses women’s issues and seeks out women writers, and also has a lot more comics and editorial cartoons than most papers we see today). This content shift was actually a much bigger problem than, like, who claimed credit for what. This was where writers–original contributors to this vision–started to get screwed. When their work was changed or dropped without consultation, I mean fake paper or not, that’s really exploitive of people’s labor, and just generally kind of unethical. Made more disturbing by the utopic vision and structure of this paper. Because whose ideal vision of the future includes having their contributions ignored or changed without consultation? Which is sort of a great lesson in how supposed utopias operate, I guess.

But originally the paper was a minor part of the plan, in a way. The end goal was this massive street party, this humungous celebration that people could come by and get sucked up into and everyone would kind of accidently be celebrating the end of the war without ever having thought it through. The paper was the originary element–it would be the thing people were holding up while dancing about the end of the war. Which is, again, still a really great idea: massive street parties to celebrate something that hasn’t exactly happened yet, particularly when we’d originally hoped to do it, over the summer when it just seemed like the Bush Administration, and the war in Iraq, would never end. And neither did this really proceed as planned–the party was fairly modest, as I understand it.

PMD: Since there were a number of activist groups involved, I imagine the initial planning stages were rather democratic, but any publication demands some sort of editorial hierarchy, even a fake publication. How was that internal workflow organized?

Josh Bayer’s editorial cartoon for the Original Fake New York Times

AEM: Right, I mean: publishing is a whole different ballgame from, like, artist’s bookmaking. It demands deadlines, oversight, which you don’t know unless you’ve worked in the industry. Especially if you’re expected to be believable as the New York Times. Generally speaking, the artistic temperament is far too ego-driven to conform to collaborative demands like agreed-upon deadlines. So I’d be working with the writers toward these crazy deadlines, and then the date of the paper would change. That was frustrating, of course, and in terms of the last few months, a pretty interesting publishing problem. Every delay allowed for humongous political changes to take place as the election cycle unfolded. It was intense, reading the paper every single day trying to envision a “solution” to it. And then when the economy was pronounced so thoroughly fucked, it was like, acch! The thing that’s going to make everyone want to party now is totally different than it was a month ago! Although by that time I’d left the project.

But the point is, the place for the democratic participation was these street parties. The democratic aspects of the *paper* were: you send in your ideal news or human interest story, the thing you’d love to read or write if the world were to get totally fixed tomorrow, and I will fix all the other parts of the paper so that your vision is viable. Ha ha. I will make that happen. Although only in text.

PMD: At what point did your interests diverge from the direction the project was taking?

AEM: I’d been really cautious from the beginning that my efforts–and the efforts of the many many people I brought on board this project–not be ultimately co-opted to further forward the brand of the Yes Men. I’ve personally had enough of my efforts going toward brand names I don’t actually believe in, and I’d only agreed to to work on this project as long as it would remain an anonymous project. When I was told much later in the process by one of my collaborators that “it was never the intention to put this paper out anonymously,” it became clear that, at least, everyone had totally different intentions and desires.

Well, and the one thing that’s really important to note is that the paper was done: conceptualized, written, edited, laid out, illustrated, when I left. Even if I didn’t believe in it anymore, I wanted to make sure they had all the pieces in place to do this right. Because it’s a good idea. I think the project that resulted is a tenth as good of an idea as what it could easily have been, however.

PMD: On your blog, you note that you felt that the prank had overtaken the purpose. Did you fear that the prank-like nature of the project was overshadowing the intent? Was there fear that the project would be dismissed as an extension of ‘60’s era, whimsical activism — as it has been, in much mass media?

Photo by Flickr user ConwayL

AEM: From the first time I heard about it, this project was about limiting the degree to which people could dismiss this as silly, a prank, some kind of utopic bullshit, or impossible. Separate from our plans to do this anonymously, we’d also planned this crazy triage system for these street parties, where people who were wearing crazy outfits would go off to this other area and only celebrate, like not distribute the paper at all. People who were too much about, like, “we’re gonna screw the New York Times! Those suckers!” Or people who were too interested in engaging this as a power struggle.

So there was always this concept that this could be dismissed, and I think it was, as you say. “A group of liberals released their wishlist for the new administration,” was the lead phrase in most of the news stories I read. Gaaaah! Like, “Kid Writes to Santa Hopes for Better World!” This is not news! What’s news here, what’s interesting, is that thousands of people banded together to work on something truly radical, truly emergent, something that could have inspired genuine change. But those interests were sidelined.

And so what happened, right, is that The Yes Men here first became the symbol that simply replaced the New York Times as the people in power. For a moment, the positions were reversed. Ho ho! It’s not the New York Times that has all the power, it’s these guys that look and act like the guys at the New York Times and live in the same city and have similar economic and racial and backgrounds. Which is a very disempowering way of thinking about power. As Foucault argues, power actually comes from everywhere, and what I was excited about in working on this project was that we’d proposed a way of articulating that. Power seemingly coming from everywhere.

I was talking to Mark Messing the other night, here in Chicago. He was talking about this project, and here it was immediately dismissed as a kinda funny joke. Which itself is really interesting: the shift in power that actually occurred between the election and, what, eight days later when the fake NYT hit, was tremendous. Already, Chicagoans were like, “New York? Why should I care?” Anyway, he was comparing this turn of events to this film he’d just seen of Fred Hampton talking about the Yippies. That all these white dudes went to jail and a ton of “awareness” was raised about the issues they were talking about, and a ton of money was raised to get them out of jail, and awesome! But in the mean time, Hampton’s out creating a free breakfast program for poor students on the South Side, actually out making real change. My point is not that anyone here is Fred Hampton, but how much “awareness” can you raise before you actually try to make change?

PMD: What is the sense among other groups and individuals that were involved about how this has played out. I don’t expect you to speak for other groups, but to the best of your knowledge, was other groups taking their piece of the credit for involvement an antagonistic move or rather an attempt to set the record straight?

AEM: I’ve heard, and witnessed, a lot of frustration with how this went down. A lot of people felt their efforts were misused and misattributed, but there’s also this sense that, as the editor of a culture paper told me, anyone who speaks up about the weird issues here risks being labeled a naysayer, or “not down with the cause”. I mean, that’s ridiculous. I am clearly down with the cause. I just think our means of achieving ends can always be bettered. Here in particular. And here are some ideas for you! Take them and do something more awesome. It’s really much easier than you can imagine.

But thank god for that the Globe and Mail piece that came out that basically said, “Really? We’re gonna believe two dudes put this thing out and raised $100,000 to do it and printed 1.2 Million papers? I mean, they did lie about the name of the paper.” I was genuinely beginning to believe that there wasn’t a single thinking soul in media anymore. So the record’s being slowly straightened. Although I’d be most excited if every single one of the contributors I contacted stepped up, or gave me permission to post their stuff. It’s genuinely amazing how many people, and who, and where, were on board this thing.

PMD: What is your understanding of the current or potential legal implications of involvement in the project?

Raghda, the UnAmerican Girl Doll, an Iraqi who works as a prostitute and comes with accouterments. Unattributed.

AEM: You know, I was out recently with this man who was like, “But since the paper was given away, copyright doesn’t apply!” And it just made me realize that people still don’t get intellectual property rights issues. Of course both copyright and trademark laws apply–like they applied when that grade school painted Mickey Mouse on its classroom wall, and like when the Girl Scouts sang Happy Birthday or the Macarena or whatever it was. So we were really careful–or I was. Consulting lawyers and really getting into that aspect of it. Of course I did. So when I started working on the paper, there was this really big issue sort of sitting there in the room like an elephant that I ignored for a little while until I couldn’t. And it was this: that we were originally using the framework of the NYT to simply make a fake NYT. Like, we were committing copyright and trademark infringement directly, with nothing underlying it except for the desire to use the stature and form of the Gray Lady for what it was, to release our message. That’s not even parody, that’s just mimicry.

So we started talking about it more, trying to get into what it was about the NYT we wanted to say, which was, “you are a part of–and a BIG part of–these problems, because you failed to cover the antiwar movement, you hired all sorts of fake reporters to tell us lies, some about the war (Judith Miller!) and some more generally, just eroding public trust in journalism for the sake of it, and you accept advertising and sponsor things and own a crazy variety of other media outlets and non-media entities, all with an intent to profit from culture, not document it factually.” And that’s when it got interesting, for me, as this long-standing media activist. That’s when we started writing the corrections page, some of which ended up in the final version. I’m going to post the couple of pages we got up on Democracy Guest List, one of these days. Because compiling all of those things, not just as accusations, but as documented facts, was overwhelming. That’s when it was like, “oh shit. The NYT is a teeny bit abhorrent.”

Of course, we were in consultation with lawyers across the country, had a whole class in law school that took this on as the semester’s project, big name lawyers, small name lawyers, one dude who misspelled “libel.” That was concerning. Some of them are starting to get some action: DeBeers, the diamond company, wasn’t so fond of the culture jammed ad on the Special Edition’s website and started demanding their Internet provider pull it, and the EFF leapt into action pretty immediately. And, you know, so far, the “real” NYT’s put on a good-natured face about the whole thing.

PMD: Were you surprised by the Times’ public bemusement to the project? How has their legal/non-official response to the project differed from their public front?

AEM: No, of course they had to go along with the joke, and the final version of the paper, and the fact that it didn’t address the economic crisis at all, I think it made it easy to dismiss on all sides, as non-offensive, and a step or two away from being timely. But the Times is one of the most protective entities in the world — and how I know this I won’t go into — so I’ll be surprised if we’ve really seen the very last of this. But maybe!

PMD: What are you taking away from this experience about the current activist climate in the United States?

AEM: This is totally a good question. I have been frustrated by the activist climate in the US for awhile–I’m sure most thinking people have been–and this project was intended to revitalize the hope that must drive demands for political change. But that even this dippy utopia-realized, C’mon,-guys!-we-can-do-it!, fake newspaper project has been sacrificed to the demands of the market, to this overriding need to put a big name behind it and dismiss it, that’s been a bummer.

Well, but much of activism right now is so focused on raising “awareness.” In other words, focused on attracting media attention. When I was working with Codepink over the summer, my hopes were to build a website for them so that they could really skip the part about attracting media attention and go straight to telling the stories they felt like weren’t being told. Because we know already that the media is a broken system, and will never get our stories right, because it will only tell the part of the story that sells. So as activists, is it even worth our while to try to get attention from a broken media? I mean, even this project–that aimed to question the legitimacy of the New York Times–was measured in media appearances. Or is it better to go straight to making our own, not in putting out one fake New York Times but generating a regular resource for positive news? Or, as Fred Hampton might argue, is it better to improve our situation now. I feel like, we had a chance with this project to do something radical–put out a fake paper filled with all sorts of good news–but do it in a way that established a new model for collaborative work. And while it didn’t work out that way, I’ve seen a way that it’s possible.

Editor’s note: It must be noted, in the spirit of full disclosure, that Anne Elizabeth Moore was my editor at the defunct Punk Planet magazine, remains a friend, and approached me to join in the fake New York Times project, a request I was unable to oblige due to other commitments.