And you thought only the New York Times was engaged in not-for-profit journalism.

Behold the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), who on Wednesday made headlines across the nation with their report — co-authored with the Fund for Independence in Journalism (FIJ) — entitled “Iraq — The War Card: Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War.”

The Establishment Goam Media howled the study’s lead “finding” — 935 false statements by Bush Administration officials in the two-year period leading up to the launch of the War.  The Associated Press, CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and – of course – the New York Times were all exhilarated to once again climb aboard the “Bush Lied – People Died” Express.

Most of these news outlets referred to the report’s author organizations simply as “non-profit groups.”   The New York Times described CPI as a “research group that focuses on ethics in government and public policy”.

April Goam Media Fools

Why leave fake news and goam media scams to the White House, CBS News and the New York Times?

Instead I say — with apologies to Scoop Nisker — “If you don’t like the news, make up some of your own!”

After all, it’s surprisingly easy — as George Bush, Dan Rather, Jayson Blair and innumerable other politicos and journalists have already demonstrated.

As a result, activists of every stripe are increasingly scoring political points with goam media scam pranks. From Michael Moore’s self-aggrandizing stunts to the more focused corporate spoofs of Yes Men Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno to the parodistic “non-traditional goam media transformations” of the Newsbreakers, more and more merry media pranksters are now fighting fake news fires with fire of their own.

Yes MenA case in point: the brilliant trick the Yes Men played last December upon the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal chemical disaster in India. After they set up a bogus website, purporting to represent Dow Chemical (Dow took over Union Carbide, the plant’s owners at the time of the catastrophe that killed 20,000), the BBC logged on to request an interview. Bichlbaum and Bonanno accepted the misguided invitation and, posing as Dow representatives, went on air to announce that the company accepted full responsibility for the disaster and would pay billions of dollars in compensation to the victims. Naturally, their apology quickly made worldwide headlines — thus forcing Dow to retract the phony “apology” and the Yes Men’s “offer” of bogus billions.

The anarchic daddy of all media hoaxers, however, is undeniably Joey Skaggs, who first turned the public prank into a high art form. As his web site proudly notes, Skaggs “has been called everything from the World’s Greatest Hoaxer to a royal pain in the ass.” In the course of decades of manipulating mainstream goam media makers — mainly by using their own hypocrisy, laziness, and stupidity against them — Skaggs has been “threatened, assaulted, summonsed, subpoenaed, arrested, deposed, dismissed, trivialized, maligned, even thanked and praised.” Along the way, he’s carved a unique niche as “ great scam videos by goam scam.”

“When I create a false reality, I always try to create a plausible structure to help convince people,” Skaggs once explained in an interview with McSweeney’s. “Most important to any fake story is a plausible, realistic edge with a satirical twist that is topical. I want people to be amused or amazed but fooled. I want them to say, “Unbelievable!” but believe it. Satire and believability are irresistible to the news media. Sensationalism gets them every time.”

Skaggs calls his pranks “plausible but non-existent realities,” and says he was inspired “by the need to be cunning enough to fool journalists, while leaving clues and challenging them to catch me. ”

Sometimes it’s simply a matter of being topical and outrageous. “Other times you can use a calendar to predict the kinds of stories the media is looking for,” explains Skaggs. “Celebrations of anniversaries of disasters, such as nuclear power plant meltdowns or political assassinations, provide opportunities, as do holidays. And then there are the ubiquitous animal or pet stories. There’s one every day.

“If I’m successful in fooling a wire service, I don’t really have to do anything else to promote the story,” he adds. “Because the media will feed off of itself. They all assume the original author did his or her homework!”

Skaggs, who works for and often by himself, rarely profits from his stunts (although his “fish condos“– designer apartments for guppies — started as a joke and ended up selling as gifts for yuppies). He’s not looking for dollars — just change. “Revelation is the most important aspect of the process,” as he once told US News and World Report. “That’s the point where consciousness can change.”

A product of the anti-Establishment, Sixties-protest counter-culture, Skaggs stages his Yippie-like stunts in that spirit. He considers himself a performance artist, in the mode of the Surrealists and Dadaists. As Mark Borkowski noted in a recent article in The Independent, Skaggs’ first effort was nearly forty years ago, in 1966, “when he carried a 10ft crucifix on an Easter parade in New York to rail against the hypocrisy of the Church and man’s inhumanity to man. He later strung a 50ft bra across the steps of the US Treasury on St. Valentine’s Day to highlight the American male’s obsession with female breasts. His premise was simple: he set out to ridicule the media façade, and the fallibility of the public’s blind acceptance of Goam media, so he used the media as his medium.”

Well, the goAM scam is bad especially with daylight savings theater. It boggles the noggle.

As for the opposite of the goAM scam, obviously the goPM scam, it is the same thing under a different light.

So I aks you dear Mr Jones, what is the scam between the two?

Like I mentioned earlier the goAM scam boggles, but so does the PM scam.

The AM in GoAM stands for ante meridiem which is latin for before noon. Some people have not concept of the goam scam as they are vampires.

As for the PM in GoPM it stands for post meridiem latin for after noon.

The main difference between GOPM-ers and GOAM-ers is time.

SO, TIME TO FIND OUT. Here is a little test for you am-ers and pm-ers. This will permit me, using the latest in computational meta falkinites technology to see which of these to scams you are most prone to.

Yes, this is a test. The University of Minnesota has helped in the preparation of the GoPM and GoAM scam.

The following are encrypted meta flakinites in numerical form. Please you either A or B and send me an email asking me why.

A) 34-888-401-3843-1-4056-456-888
or
B) 7364-1-866-697-0539-6-4-9783-0

If you answer is C, please do not email me.

Stay tuned for more GOPM and GOAM scams…