Satire is served straight up
Ah, college life. All-night study sessions in the library. Professors challenging the conventional wisdom. Snowball battles on the quad.
Get real.
For students at the University of Missouri-Columbia, college is all about casual sex, meddling parents, foul-mouthed friendships and partying until you puke -- that is, if you believe the portrayal in the Booze News, a new weekly newspaper that glorifies the wonders of heavy drinking.
The publication’s founders, a pair of University of Illinois graduates, call the Booze News (motto: “Today’s News . . . Under the Influence”) an over-the-top satire modeled after the Onion, the popular parody newspaper started by college students in Madison, Wis., that has since gone global.
But some Missouri students and local business owners aren’t laughing. A Booze News book review about interracial gay adoption that referred to the two male parents as “freaks” drew a formal protest and request that university officials censure the paper.
Afraid of offending customer sensibilities, several downtown business owners have thrown out the free paper, which has published seven issues. Even some campus fraternity houses deem the material too edgy.
“The paper is not for 8-year olds,” said co-founder Atish Doshi, a 2004 Illinois graduate from suburban Detroit. “It’s about being immature college kids. That’s what makes it successful. We don’t take ourselves seriously.”
Success has come quickly for Doshi and Derek Chin, who said they started the paper three years ago as “a complete joke.”
The Booze News can now be found at Illinois State, Indiana, Iowa and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, along with Missouri and Illinois.
Doshi, who works in Chicago with a full-time staff of six, said he expected to expand to a dozen more campuses in the next year: “I would love to be at as many schools as possible. There will always be college students.”
For Missouri senior Kyle Ali, a Chicago native, such a scenario is troubling. As a peer educator who works to control drug and alcohol abuse, Ali said the Booze News sent the wrong message, humorous or not. “This is a publication that clearly condones high-risk behavior,” he said. “There’s nothing that talks about alcohol poisoning or drunk-driving.”
A recent issue of the Missouri edition does contain a public service announcement by the U.S. Department of Transportation about the dangers of drunken driving. There’s also a small disclaimer that the paper “in no way promotes, encourages or supports binge drinking and/or underage drinking.”
“This newspaper is designed for entertainment purposes only,” the disclaimer reads.
More prominent, though, are features on the local bartender of the week, alcohol reviews, drink recipes, drinking-game instructions and guidelines on how to beat hangovers.
The paper’s website says that its writers, editors and advertising sales members “are drunk at least four hours a day, six days a week” but assures readers that “we are not obnoxious drunks.”
The recent article about the adoptive gay couple -- a supposed book review in which the unidentified author looked solely at the cover of the children’s book -- crossed the line from satire to threatening speech, Ali said.
He wrote a letter to other campus activists and the university’s vice chancellor of student affairs urging a potential boycott of local businesses that distribute the weekly paper.
“That article was specifically threatening to the social environment on this campus,” he said.
The paper’s managing editor, who has since stepped down, acknowledged in a note to readers that the article, though intended as humor, “went a little far.” Doshi said that he regretted publishing it and that the writer had been fired.
Broader community acceptance in Columbia will come with time, Doshi said.
“Everyone thinks and does the same thing at some point in life,” he said. “But when they see it in print and have it become a realization, all of a sudden it’s morally wrong.”