Incarceration Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery, Or, Did News Corp. Call The NYPD On Fake Post?

“Did Rupert Murdoch call the fuzz on the Yes Men?” tweets David Carr, (in what could also be the opening line to an old Perry Mason episode). What Carr is referring to, of course, is Monday’s fake New York Post prank, orchestrated by the group Yes Men, who published and handed out their (impressive) environmentally-themed version of the Post at multiple locations around the city. Or attempted to hand it out, anyway.

“Nothing like a picture of cops hauling away papers to put the chill in bones.”

Daily Finance’s Jeff Bercovici reported that New York City police officers were spotted at News Corp. headquarters Monday confiscating the fake papers and that the three volunteers who’d been handing them out had been detained. Which is sort of troubling on a number of levels, the primary one being: why are the NYPD confiscating newspaper? But also: who caledl the cops (or the fuzz, as Carr puts it)? Bercovici thinks it was the Rupe man, himself.

Melissa Lockwood, one of the three volunteers involved in the incident, says she arrived at 1211 Avenue of the Americas at 4:30 a.m. to begin distributing copies of the parody…Lockwood says she handed out hundreds of copies over three hours with no trouble.

But that changed sometime after 7:30 a.m., when one of her fellow volunteers succeeded in placing a paper into the hand of News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch as he entered the building. Shortly after that, says Lockwood, two police officers who had been observing from a patrol car parked nearby approached her and instructed her to stop what she was doing.

“They were like, ‘These are not the real New York Post. This is a forgery. You could be in big trouble,'” Lockwood recalls. “They said we couldn’t leave until the New York Post officials came to prove that that we had fraudulent papers.”

First of all, I am no expert, but I am pretty sure that for fraud to have taken place the Yes Men would have had to been charging for their newspapers, and not handing them out for free (satire is not against the law, actually I’m fairly sure it’s protected under it). Secondly, for a man (and a company) who publishes a newspaper that traffics in cover pages like these, one might expect Rupert Murdoch to have a better sense of humor about the whole thing!

The Post actually has been almost completely mum on the whole debacle, only going so far as to publish an AP piece about News Corp.’s statement saying they were “flattered” (sort of), furthermore the police say no one was technically detained and no papers were technically confiscated. So, yeah, that’s technically a relief. Bercovici has the full deets here.

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