Rupert Murdoch isn’t laughing.
According to The New York Times, a parody of The Wall Street Journal on US newsstands this week to mark the April 15 tax deadline dubbed ‘My Wall Street Journal’ has pi-sed off News Corp executives so much that Wall Street Journal reps are running around town buying up copies to prevent people from seeing them.
Check out the online version at www.wsjparody.com:
The publication, replete with stipple portraits (of Ann Coulter’s nip-les) includes headlines like “Cleaning Lady Sees Virgin In Merrill Lynch Q4 Loss,” and the front page story “Bush Abolishes Death, Taxes — Move will Benefit McCain.”
Self-described as a “sizzling satire of the people responsible for the staggering mess we’re in” the paper promises the chance to “laugh away your great depression” with work by writers from The Onion, The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live, The New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal itself.
Sponsors include Poor Little Bear Stearns, Texacon — sucking the world dry for America — and Minimum Securities.
But the po-faced WSJ, not known for laughing it up, is not impressed. The New York Times reports that a WSJ representative attempted to snatch up all the copies in the Los Angeles area:
It was not supposed to go on sale until this week, but some newsstands began selling it early. Last Thursday, Alexander Laurence was working at one such stand in Los Angeles, chatting with a customer, David Metz, when, both of them say, a man in a shirt with a Journal logo asked if anyone had seen a paper that looked sort of like The Journal.
“This guy comes by all the time to bring promotional stuff for The Wall Street Journal — bags, coin trays, stickers,” Mr. Laurence said.
Sure enough, they found what he was looking for. “He grabbed them all, said, ‘I need to buy all of these,’ ” Mr. Laurence said. “He had been going around to different stands, buying them.
The editorial team, citing the motto “We Distort. You Decide” are the same team that created the 1982 Off The Wall Street Journal, led by editor-in-chief Tony Hendra. But this time they’ve channelled YouTube too —this campaign video shows a fake Rupert Murdoch reading My WSJ:
I’d always given Fox News the banner:
We Distort…You Deride
It got a laugh at my place
If his megalomania wasn’t becoming so tragic he could become a laughter relief for the world. Steve Martin: you should have seen Murdoch when he was impressing Wendi Deng, for want of a better way of putting it. He dyed his hair a sort of butternut-pumpkin shade. Awfulness squared. He’s becoming more and more like Conrad Black with infinitely more money.
Murdoch sounds more like a South African than an ex-Australian. For a while Murdoch was sporting a parody of an American accent after his re-birth as a US citizen, though that appears to be modified now.
Looks like the Yes Men? They really know how to research their stuff.