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The Yes Men's Bhopal prank
If you've seen the Yes Men documentary, you know those guys are geniuses. But have you seen the stunt they pulled on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster? The Yes Men are mostly known for masquerading as members of the WTO. But this time,Yes Man
"Andy" manages to pass himself off to BBC World Television viewers as a
representative from Dow Chemical. Live on camera, Andy (as "Jude Finisterra") apologizes on
behalf of Dow and promises to $12 billion to compensate the
surviving victims!
We expect the story to be retracted immediately, but Dow takes two hours to notice that alas and alack, it's done the right thing. The full interview therefore runs twice, and for two hours the story is the top item on news.google.com. CNN reports a Dow stock loss of 2 billion dollars on the German exchange. After Dow notes emphatically that it is not in fact going to do right by those non-shareholders in Bhopal, the retraction remains the top Google story for the rest of the day.
Back at Andy's apartment, we help Dow express itself more fully by mailing out a more formal retraction: "Dow will NOT commit ANY funds to compensate and treat 120,000 Bhopal residents who require lifelong care.... Dow will NOT remediate (clean up) the Bhopal plant site.... Dow's sole and unique responsibility is to its shareholders, and Dow CANNOT do anything that goes against its bottom line unless forced to by law."
You can read the full story and watch the video here.
Posted by Carrie McLaren on 03/21/2005 | Permalink
Comments
video link is screwed up.
Posted by: rossi | Mar 21, 2005 11:41:41 PM
More here.
Posted by: Adam | Mar 22, 2005 9:22:32 AM
This time I was disappointed with the otherwise excellent Yes Men. This prank happened at a time that BBC was up for charter review, and the loss of BBC's cred in the press and public opinion gave ammunition to Murdoch and his allies in their crusade to destroy public service broadcasting. Sure, BBC got taken in like any network would, but they're not like other news services...there is a major tradition of public service broadcasting in the UK quite unlike what we have here in the USA, and we need to do what we can to sustain and strengthen it.
Posted by: Rick | Mar 22, 2005 11:15:57 PM
