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City Clips by Ross Crockford
Several hundred newspaper readers in Victoria got a surprise when they picked up the May 3 edition of the National Post. Amid the usual cover stories about the demand for tax cuts and COMPAS polls confirming overwhelming support for a United Alternative, there were other strange items – such as an open-pit coal mine in Alberta creating a version of Mount Rushmore immortalizing Brian Mulroney, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and (of course) Conrad Black.
The parody edition was created by the Vancouver group Guerrilla Media, perhaps best known for its "billboard liberation" campaigns. Noam de Plume, one of the group's ringleaders, said the aim of the parody is to raise awareness about the consequences of the concentration of media ownership. One page was devoted to a chilling history of Canadian newspapers (88 percent of our daily circulation is controlled by four companies) and the effect it has upon content (keyword search of four big dailies revealed that "competition" was referred to in 8,045 articles in 1998, while "cooperation" only ranked 9393 mentions). The parody also offered remedies: In Sweden, for instance, a tax on advertising supports small-circulation publications, and loan credits helped launch 17 new papers in that country in eight years.
Around 40,000 copies of the parody were distributed across the country, but predictably it received little or no attention in Canada's dailies. To see an electronic version, check out ; Guerrilla Media can also be reached at (604) 877-4721.
The
Peak,
May
10, 1999
Guerrilla Media spoofs Tubby by Mat X
On Wednesday May 4, Guerrilla Media handed out their own version of Conrad Black's national newspaper to unsuspecting commuters throughout Vancouver and across Canada. An army of volunteers in three cities distributed more than 40,000 copies of the parody Post starting at seven in the morning. Copies of the spoof issue showed up in Vancouver, Victoria and Toronto.
In Vancouver, the wide-eyed bunch of media pranksters stood out in the cold early in the morning and staked out every skytrain station and bus loop in town. The young and old members of this diverse group wrapped the real version of the National Post in the coin boxes with their own four-page late-morning edition, and handed out copies to everyone taking public transportation.
"I haven't had a chance to read it," said Mark Hume, The National Post's only Vancouver-based reporter "so I don't know if it's funny. But it's a pretty good-looking spoof."
Hume knows it's not the first time or the last time The National Post will get spoofed, adding that it comes with the territory. All the mainstream media get lampooned eventually, he said. Hume said he was familiar with Guerrilla Media and the work they've done over the years.
"They have done some funny spoofs in the past," Hume said. "They're usually pretty good quality. I think it's fair game. I don't take offence from that. They're raising some important issues."
Hume is a "news and features" writer, and The National Post's only reporter in Vancouver and British Columbia. In contrast, The Globe and Mail has seven reporters covering B.C.
"I think we're pretty understaffed here. One reporter to cover Vancouver is not enough, but to cover the whole province is pretty ridiculous," Hume said.
Guerrilla Media is not the first group to pick on Black's excuse for a national newspaper. In January, The Peak produced a spoof called The National Peak, and in April, the University of Western Ontario's student newspaper, printed The National Pest.
In doing so, these student newspapers continued the long tradition of lampooning other media outlets. For example, The Peak has made a spoof of Maclean's magazine on at least two occasions: once in 1967 with a parody called Macleen's and again in 1992 with McLuhan's.
Guerrilla Media is not affiliated with any university student newspapers but spoofing the mainstream media is one of their favourite activities. They have spoofed The Vancouver Sun, printing a parody called The Vancouver Stump; The Globe and Mail became The Glib and Stale, and The Province was The Providence.
What motivates these so-called activists, and monkey wrenchers of the nation's media? Guerrilla Media explains itself by saying that its mission is to create "popular education projects around social justice issues." Vancouver's own infamous media critics are well-known and their targets are widespread; they have hit all major newspapers and the most notorious examples of corporate sponsorship of cultural and sporting events in Vancouver.
"By using satire as our main political tool, we primarily create and widely distribute parodies of daily newspapers, and government and corporate promotional materials," explain Guerrilla Media on their Web site .
By subverting the mainstream media Guerrilla Media has successfully spoofed the corporations running the media, and questioned their motives. As well as their print media parody efforts, Guerrilla Media also has several web sites devoted to bringing the message to today's net-savvy generation.
On the Net there is , which specifically targets Conrad Black, and one devoted to their recent National Post spoof .
Not only targeting the mainstream media, Guerrilla Media has also parodied cultural and sporting events, as well as other various causes.
The most famous attacks have been on the Du Maurier Jazz Fest which has been spoofed three times in five years in such counter-ad campaigns as: du Mourir Ltd, Multinational Jazzy Deathfest; du Murder Ltd. Jazz festival fun; and the Vancouver Jazz festival de Murdered again.
Other targets of Guerrilla Media in the past have included: BC Transit, APEC, tobacco sponsors in Vancouver, the Southam newspaper chain, Vancouver civic election candidates, the Vancouver Grizzlies, the Commonwealth Games, and the Symphony of Fire.
Observer
Don't
expect to read about the latest stunt pulled by Guerrilla
Media in The Sun or Province this week. That
wacky Vancouver-based groups of media critics has
distributed a spoof issue of the Post, in a major
poke at the National Post, and its owner Conrad
Black, and the octopus-like Hollinger/Southam company that
controls 44 per cent of Canada's newspapers, including both
Vancouver dailies. A total of 40,000 issues of the
four-page, eerily similar Post parody was distributed
throughout Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria Wednesday
morning, expounding the evils of concentrated ownership and
agenda-setting. (The Westender, owned by "the other
Black", doesn't even rate its own slice of a newspaper
ownership pie chart graphic included in the spoof edition of
the Post.
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