YU News Service
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Yossarian Universal News Service (YU News Service) was co-founded in 1980 by satirists Paul Fericano and Elio Ligi in response to both Ronald Reagan's presidency of the United States and the fundamental belief of freedom from the press. Predating The Onion and The Daily Show, YU launched a series of parody news stories on the Republican agenda and offered its own press card for sale to anyone who applied for it. Its motto: “Unbelievable news for unbelievable times.”
During the eighties, YU's dispatches were subscribed to by a number of diverse publications and media outlets in the U.S. and abroad, including The Nation, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Paul Krassner's The Realist, Mother Jones, The Progressive, National Public Radio, Saturday Night Live, Punch (London), El Pais ( Bogota ), La Prensa (Managua), and Krokodil (Moscow).
In 1984, The One Minute President, YU's Candide-inspired satire on the policies of the Reagan administration, was published in Germany. A U.S. edition of the book followed two years later. In January, 1987, YU became the first news organization to name the Iran/Contra Affair “Nancygate,” holding the First Lady accountable for not waking the President during both his terms.
In the nineties under Presidents George H. Bush and Bill Clinton, YU continued to report on the growing conservative takeover, publishing a series of infamous interviews with such luminaries as Antonin Scalia, Newt Gingrich, Jerry Falwell, Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, Pope John Paul II, Frank Sinatra, and the brain of former CIA Director William Casey.
Ater the 2000 election, YU issued regular weekly dispatches chronicling George W. Bush's first year in office. Three days after 9/11, YU was the only news organization in the country to identify Bush's crusade against terrorism as his “re-election campaign war.” The weekly stories were sent to thousands of email subscribers all over the world and posted online at ZNet Interactive. A collection of these stories, I, Terrorist: Dispatches from the Front, was rejected by over 20 U.S. publishers at the height of Bush's popularity in 2002-2003.
Today, Yossarian Universal continues to entertain and inspire its audiences with its unique brand of parody news, including a series of satiric broadcasts produced exclusively for radio: The One Minute News Hour, The YU Sports Update, The Quantum News Report, and The YU Almanac.
