How Not to Write Satire

“In a stunning development one day after the release of Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President, by Dr. Jerome Corsi, World Net Daily Editor and Chief Executive Officer Joseph Farah has announced plans to recall and pulp the entire 200,000 first printing run of the book,” Esquire reported this morning.

Esquire.comMark Warren wrote the disastrous satire. 

Make that ” ‘reported’ ” this morning. Less than two hours after Mark Warren posted the story on the Esquire website, he added a disclaimer: “For those who didn’t figure it out yet, and the many on Twitter for whom it took a while: We committed satire this morning to point out the problems with selling and marketing a book that has had its core premise and reason to exist gutted by the news cycle, several weeks in advance of publication. Are its author and publisher chastened? Well, no. They double down, and accuse the President of the United States of perpetrating a fraud on the world by having released a forged birth certificate. Not because this claim is in any way based on reality, but to hold their terribly gullible audience captive to their lies, and to sell books. This is despicable, and deserves only ridicule. That’s why we committed satire in the matter of the Corsi book. Hell, even the president has a sense of humor about it all.”

If Farah and Corsi are to be believed, they do not find this funny at all, though one may be forgiven for suspecting that they’re laughing all the way to the bank. The Daily Caller reports that “Farah said he is considering ‘legal options’ against the magazine for posting the story”:

“Let me say this very clearly: There is not a single word of that report that is true. I assume it is a very poorly executed parody. In any case, I have begun exploring our legal options, since this report has all the earmarkings of a deliberate attempt at restraint of trade, not to mention libel.”

Over at WND, in a story posted before the disclaimer was added to the Esquire post, Farah lobs an accusation that is about as plausible as the book itself:

“This is an astonishingly reckless report by a company that has demonstrated its total disregard for the truth,” said Farah. “I don’t know who Esquire’s anonymous sources are, but I can only guess that their address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Farah surmised Esquire will claim the article is parody, but he points out that news organizations around the world were contacting him within minutes of its posting on the Internet, with some of them in doubt as to the veracity of the report.

Does WND have a case against Esquire? Color us skeptical. Farah and Corsi are public figures, so that in order to prove libel, they would need to establish not only that the material was false but that it was published with “actual malice”–defined in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan as “knowledge that it was false or . . . reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.’

A satirist, of course, knows that he is asserting falsehoods–but the expectation is that the reader will recognize them as such. In Hustler v. Falwell (1988), a pornographic magazine published an ad parody describing a televangelist having had intimate relations with his mother in an outhouse. Chief Justice William Rehnquist noted that the jury had held the parody was not libelous because it “could not ‘reasonably be understood as describing actual facts about [respondent] or actual events in which [he] participated.’ ” (The high court heard the case because the jury held in the plaintiff’s favor on another claim, for intentional infliction of emotional distress.)

Esquire would not be able to avail itself of that defense. A reasonable person could have understood its satire as a truthful report. Indeed, this columnist did just that. We read the post a few minutes before the disclaimer was appended, and when we got to the part where the satire quotes “a source at WND”–falsely, we hasten to add–as saying, “We don’t want to look like [obscenity redacted] idiots,” we thought: Maybe they’re not as bad as we thought. (It gives us some amusement to imagine the guys at WND in court, vigorously defending the proposition that they do want to look like [obscenity redacted] idiots.)

Esquire’s defense, rather, would be that it published the parody believing in good faith no one could reasonably understand it as a true report. The speed with which it posted the disclaimer that it was satire–the equivalent of a correction to an actual false report–would be a strong piece of evidence in its favor.

As to “restraint of trade,” that accusation presupposes that the Esquire parody was a guise for an anticompetitive conspiracy to harm WND’s publishing business. A judge and jury–unlike WND and its readers–would reject such a theory unless there was evidence to support it.

But WND doesn’t need a lawsuit, for it has already won. “The book is selling briskly,” WND quotes Farah as saying, and the free publicity from Esquire surely isn’t hurting. Esquire’s journalistic reputation has been tarnished, too–to the point where we’d be hard-pressed to say it’s any more lustrous than WND’s. Writing good satire isn’t as easy as it looks.