Your neologismic servant, a spastic parodic — or is it “parodian” —, speaks his title. For one crowning moment, the Gray Lady really was “fake news.” An October surprise, so to speak.
In September 1978, a strike by pressmen had shut down New York’s major newspapers. In the resulting vacuum, a “living room full of New York writers… wrote, designed and distributed a satirical replica of The New York Times.”
In one parody column, the writer, walking past a pile of skulls to interview Genghis Khan, praised his ability to “get things done.” It took a “six-month investigation by a team of 35 Not The Times reporters” to determine that cocaine “appears popular.”
“The first person I called was the New Yorker writer Veronica Geng…. She came over and handed me the piece on the front page, ‘Carter Forestalls Efforts to Defuse Discord Policy.’” (Rusty Unger)
“I wrote the James Reston column. It wasn’t entirely about him, but it was about [the foreign correspondent and columnist] Cy Sulzberger and people like that who have this rather elevated view of the world, and were always meeting with princes and presidents, and giving the authoritative word on what’s going on.” (Frances FitzGerald)
“There was an air of secrecy about my involvement. I’m sure I told my parents, but not many other people. There was a great fear that The Times was going to hate this, and they would go off on some Trumpian purge of employees who’d had anything to do with it.” (Steven Crist)
“Nobody was being paid and nobody was going to get credit, and there was never a better atmosphere of creativity and freedom and camaraderie. Where are you going to find those parameters again?” (Rusty Unger)
(Alex Traub, “When All the Zingers Were Fit to Print,” NYTimes, 4-1-20)
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
Sauerkraut Ice Cream
George Will reviews “American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition,” Edited by Andrew J. Bacevich. Being susceptible to typography-based graphics I was drawn in by the illustration. Will’s opening statement added enticement.
When assembling an anthology of writings representative of a political persuasion, the challenge is to acknowledge the persuasion’s varieties without producing a concoction akin to sauerkraut ice cream, a jumble of incompatible ingredients.
Two passages of Will’s critique sum it up. In the first, note the “however”; it betokens serious preceding quibbles.
The volume is, however, a nourishing cafeteria of writers, many of them justly forgotten but still interesting because they once were interesting.
The second passage credits Bacevich’s most inspired selection to be Joan Didion’s “1972 stiletto of an essay ‘The Women’s Movement,’ which begins, ‘To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone “oppressed” to break them.’”
Didion, who long ago contributed to National Review and in 1964 voted for Barry Goldwater, here exemplified an analytical acuity, stylistic verve and unenthralled mentality that conservatism, like other persuasions, rarely attains.
(George F. Will, “The Mind of Conservatism,” NYTimes, 4-1-20)
I confess to having to be reminded that there are, or have been at least, capable minds behind conservatism. The current scene belies it.
(c) 2020 JMN