Liberal Pranksters Use Stunts to 'Fix the World'

Oct. 27, 2009— -- Humorous hijinks might not seem to have much of a place amid the weighty and often acrimonious policy debates taking place across the country these days.

But liberal pranksters Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno -- known as the "Yes Men" -- believe having fun and being funny are both legitimate and necessary components of lobbying for their political causes.

Bichlbaum, 44, a teacher at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City, and Bonanno, 42, a professor of media arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., undertake bold pranks on corporate giants and political icons in legal -- but perhaps morally questionable -- attempts to publicly humiliate them into changing their ways.

The duo has infamously impersonated corporate spokesmen on international TV, distributed more than a million counterfeit New York Times newspapers, launched imposter Web sites to contradict their opponents' and even chased after a Democratic senator in outrageous costumes to try to embarrass him.

In their most recent scheme -- holding a phony news conference under the banner of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- Bichlbaum masqueraded as a Chamber spokesman to announce a dramatic reversal in the group's stance on pending climate change legislation.

The so-called news was broadcast by several cable news outlets before it confused reporters and was refuted by angry Chamber officials. The Chamber has now sued the duo, accusing them of trademark and copyright infringement.

The Yes Men's ploys, which are videotaped and posted online, have amassed a sizable following through blogs and social media. Their two independent films, collections of the duo's most famous pranks, have won over audiences at international film festivals. The latest film, "Yes Men Fix the World," is rolling out in theaters across the country.

But to many of Bichlbaum's and Bonanno's targets, their antics are not a laughing matter. The mixed messages sown by a prank can create an embarrassing and sometimes damaging public relations nightmare that's hard to prevent and counteract.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the Yes Men hoax distracted from the "genuine effort to find solutions on the challenge of climate change."

The Chamber also said it was asking law enforcement to investigate the incident for criminal wrongdoing.

For their part, Bichlbaum and Bonanno are confident in the legality of their tactics and say they have never been prosecuted for a crime.

The company's apparent about-face, at the hands of the Yes Men, caused Dow's stock to plummet by more than 3 percent in European markets in the hours before the fraud was exposed. BBC later retracted the story and apologized to Dow.

"The interview was inaccurate, part of an elaborate deception," BBC said in a statement read on the air. "We want to make it clear the information he gave was entirely inaccurate."

Dow would not comment on what actions, if any, the company considered taking against the Yes Men or the BBC.

Bichlbaum and Bonanno met through a mutual friend in 1997 and began collaborating when they launched a Web site for fellow liberal activists. Two years later, the two perpetrated their first prank: a mock Web site for the World Trade Organization, which was meeting in Seattle, Wash., at the time.

"We couldn't make it to Seattle, but we felt an affinity to the protests," Bonanno said of the site. "We knew we were onto something when we started getting e-mails from people who thought our site really was the WTO."

In the years that followed, Bichlbaum and Bonanno continued their subversion primarily by creating mock Web sites to spread their message. Many of them are still accessible online. But over time, as search engines improved to filter out illegitimate sites, the pair say they had to get more creative.

In November 2008, the Yes Men published more than a million copies of a fake New York Times . The spoofed papers, dated July 4, 2009, were distributed on the streets of New York City with the headline "Iraq War Ends."