Financial Crimes

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/UK/Media/2000-09/financial260900.shtml

Picked up your latest copy of Financial Crimes?
Why are anti-globalisation campaigners turning to hoax newspapers to get

their message across?
By Gibby Zobel
26 September 2000
I'm in a three-bedroom flat in north London. It's 3am. The place is
covered
in rucksacks and people reading print-outs, passing comments. There's
one
computer, manned by a homeless designer, his face furrowed in
concentration.

You may see the result today being handed out on the streets in London
and
beyond. You would be forgiven for thinking you were reading the FT. The
pink
paper, the world market graphics, the features on fuel, debt, the
Olympics.
But after considering the slant on the lead - "World Bank terrorism -
more
evidence" - you may have realised that the logo reads, in fact,
Financial
Crimes. It is the latest, ever-more professional tool in the kit of
anti-globalisation campaigners - the spoof newspaper.
Today is touted as the latest in a line of days of action against global

capitalism, timed to coincide with the 55th meeting of the International

Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Prague. It follows the carnival in
the
city of London on 18 June last year, the unprecedented scenes in Seattle
in
November and the May Day riots. Each day has seen its own pretend paper.

Since the first 20,000 print run of Evading Standards, a skit on
London's
Evening Standard, was published in April 1997 for a march in support of
the
Liverpool Dockers, the mockery idea has spawned its own imitators
world-wide.
That original issue was seized in bulk by police and three people were
charged with incitement to affray. The use of the masthead with the
statue
of Eros and a joke advert for the Metropolitan Police breached
copyright.
But the spoofers sued the Met for wrongful arrest and were awarded
five-figure costs. The money funded the next edition, and Evading
Standards
made a return for the demonstration in the City of London with an
appropriate thanks in the small print.
"Developing alternatives must be a collective endeavour. Publishing this

newspaper is only part of that process," says the Financial Crimes
editorial, written by the direct action collective Reclaim the Streets.
It
is an attempt by campaigners to bypass the mainstream media and deliver
their message direct.
The lengths they go to are sophisticated. One mock London Underground
flyer
was published using the exclusive Johnson typeface, leaked to the group
by
an anti-privatisation Tube worker.
And it appears to be effective. The subversives responsible for the
regional
south coast effort this year, the Brighton & Hove No Leaders, received
this
glowing tribute from the proprietor of the real thing, the Leader. "We
have
evidence that substantial confusion has already taken place," wrote
Howard
Scott, managing director of Newsquest (Sussex) Ltd. "We are not against
parody and satire as such. However, we believe your publication goes a
long
way too far." Another one of Newsquest's publications, the Evening
Argus,
was renamed the Evening Anus in an earlier stunt. In Bristol, the
Evening
Post is now variously the Evening Pissed or Pest. Not very subtle, but
the
monikers have stuck locally.
Giving the paper out on the streets was the only distribution method
available to UK pranksters, but when the concept crossed the Atlantic,
the
game moved on. Protesters against the World Trade Organisation produced
a
quality copy of the awkwardly named Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Squads
of
early morning paperboys and girls simply opened up the street boxes with
a
quarter, replaced the outer four pages and put them back. They were
attacked
in an angry editorial the next day.
The San Francisco Chomical used the same technique to highlight the
incarceration on death-row of black activist and writer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

"Nothing like this has ever happened before," said Randy Schuller, head
of
security for the San Francisco Newspaper Agency. "We've hired an
investigator to check it out."
America has seen this before, however. In 1978 a New York Times spoof
was
produced by striking journalists, including Watergate's Carl Bernstein.
Many
other hacks in dispute have done the same, from London's Time Out to The

Morning Star. "The most successful pastiches are done by ex-employees,"
says
underground newspaper chronicler Nigel Fountain. "You've got to really
understand the thinking behind the product to satirise or deconstruct,"
he
says, but admits he has yet to come across the new protagonists. The
difference in the new field is two-fold. One, the satire is generally
one
page deep to pull in the reader and the rest is analysis, ranging from
quality critique to diatribe dogma. Secondly, this is no media-on-media
effort, merely a vehicle.
There was an all-night debate in the north London flat over the four
lines
of type which run at the foot of the Financial Crimes. Fearing a
capitalist
compromise, the final disclaimer reads thus: "The aping of newspapers,
the
use of advanced technologies and the use of printers run for profit,
should
in no way be seen as an endorsement of newspapers, capitalist social
relations or industrial society." No FT? Plenty of comments.
The writer is news editor of 'The Big Issue'


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