Two new Twitter accounts give you everything you love about Vox and Salon, and something more.
@Salondotcom, a parody account of the 19-year-old Web pioneer Salon.com, and @vauxnews, a parody of the six-month-old Ezra Klein “explanatory journalism” venture Vox.com, both sport the same profile picture as the real accounts for the left-leaning sites.
@Salondotcom began its Twitter career with a dig at progressives on free speech:
https://twitter.com/Salondotcom/statuses/481194581942235136
@vauxnews kicked off with a fake link to a characteristic “voxplanation,” the feelings toward which are revealed by a Twitter search containing the words “Vox” and “condescending.”
https://twitter.com/vauxnews/statuses/481801968579379200
Some have already been fooled:
@Salondotcom @JK_Porterfield Translation: SC made decisions Salon doesn't like.
— Will-o'-the-Wisp (@wharrison51) June 30, 2014
@decunningham2 Getting harder and harder to tell the parody accounts from the real thing these days!
— Will-o'-the-Wisp (@wharrison51) June 30, 2014
@Salondotcom tends to keep the satire a bit more subtle than @vauxnews, which readily lays on the snark.
Actual Vox.com tweet:
Excellent news — the economy added 288,000 new jobs in June: http://t.co/DpUlsrOdbD
— Vox (@voxdotcom) July 3, 2014
@vauxnews tweet:
https://twitter.com/vauxnews/statuses/484680091218493440
Salon has been around for so long that there is a still-live parody of it from March 1997. But Salon in its present form is such a distilled essence of itself that the kind of parody offered by @Salondotcom is almost impossible to tell from the real thing.
Fake:
https://twitter.com/Salondotcom/statuses/484434342253719552
Real:
The emerging science of neuroeconomics reveals that money literally kills empathy http://t.co/OrnJZEn8GU
— Salon (@Salon) July 3, 2014
Fake:
https://twitter.com/Salondotcom/statuses/483970998459723777
Real:
If men could get pregnant, the Supreme Court NEVER would have issued their terrible Hobby Lobby ruling http://t.co/XSX7UO7ukQ
— Salon (@Salon) July 3, 2014
Fake:
https://twitter.com/Salondotcom/statuses/483767284251758592
Real:
In praise of the "beta male": "Sensitive, nurturing, conflict-averse communicators make great partners" http://t.co/D7rejflY2n
— Salon (@Salon) June 30, 2014
@vauxnews is particularly helpful for keeping abreast of current events:
https://twitter.com/vauxnews/statuses/484720758166261762
Read the story here.
https://twitter.com/vauxnews/statuses/484714330437349376
Read the story here.
https://twitter.com/vauxnews/statuses/484390781088591873
Read the story here.
If the parody is close enough, do we still need the original? In his short story “Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges describes how Miguel de Cervantes set out to parody and deflate the pretensions of romantic chivalric literature, only to have time turn the parody itself into a beloved chivalric romance.
“For both of them, for the dreamer and the dreamed, the tissue of that whole plot consisted in the contraposition of two worlds: the unreal world of the books of chivalry and the common everyday world of the seventeenth century,” Borges writes. “Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony. Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad’s haunts or Ariosto’s vast geographies.”
“You can’t make up anything anymore,” said the late Art Buchwald. “The world itself is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it.”
— Celina Durgin is a Franklin Center intern at National Review Online.