Someone should satirize this: The New Yorker magazine’s website has broken with tradition and labeled the Andy Borowitz Report as “Not the News.”

Andy Horowitz of The New Yorker. Photo via medfeedia.com
Andy Horowitz of The New Yorker. Photo via medfeedia.com
Borowitz has been crafting plausible-but-nonsensical takes on current events since 2001, and his fans get the joke. They’re not real news reports.

But social media sharing of the latest Borowitz hilarity apparently has led some to take him seriously. So to avoid his work being lumped in with “fake news” posts, the magazine has taken steps to clarify what he does.

Women’s Wear Daily noted: “Last week, the magazine changed the tagline of Andy Borowitz’s popular online satirical humor column, which consistently tops The New Yorker’s trending chart, from ‘the news, reshuffled’ to the more blunt ‘not the news’ and added a banner to prominently display the new tagline when the posts get shared on social media.”

NewYorker.com editor Nicholas Thompson was quoted as saying: “Obviously Andy’s stories are not real. We always want to make it clear that it’s satire. We never want readers to think that they are the real news.

“The reasons why we made the adjustment are both public concern, and then also, there’s a proliferation of stuff that is not real. So it might be harder to distinguish a Borowitz Report post on Facebook now than it was a year ago.”

Recent examples:

“You don’t want to have to have a headline that says: ‘This is a Joke, Trump to Split Time Between Trump Tower and the Kremlin,’” Thompson said. “You want somebody to look at that and then realize it’s a joke.”

Some still don’t get the joke.

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