The Daily Currant

» see dailycurrant.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The Daily Currant launched in July 2012 and ran on one joke, executed over and over with a straight face. It wrote invented news stories about American politics in the exact register of a wire report, with no winking headline and no visual signal that you were reading satire. The subjects were picked so that the fabricated thing came out only slightly stupider than the real thing. Then it waited for somebody to fall for it, which happened constantly.

One of the earliest, dated 3 July 2012, had Rick Santorum caught using Grindr during an interview and explaining that he was looking for the nearest coffee shop. Then George W. Bush accidentally voting for Obama because he could not work the machine. Then Todd Akin claiming breast milk cures homosexuality, which is the one that shows the method, because Akin had recently said something real about legitimate rape and the invented quote sat inside a plausible range.

Quantcast put the site over 1.5 million page views a month. It was compared to The Onion constantly, though the two were aimed at different targets. The Onion writes jokes that are funny once you understand they are jokes. The Currant wrote items whose entire payload was delivery into a real news cycle, so the funny part happened somewhere else, in a newsroom that had not checked.

I did not read it at the time and would not have got much of it if I had. The premise needs you to know which US congressman said what last month, well enough to feel the half-inch of exaggeration, which is a thing you either have from living inside that news cycle or do not have at all. What earns it a grave anyway is the timing. The last new story went up on 31 August 2016, and by 22 November 2016 the site was no longer operating, which puts its disappearance inside the exact weeks when the phrase fake news stopped meaning satire.

~ the case file ~

~ the stories that landed ~

In March 2013 the Currant reported that Paul Krugman had filed for personal bankruptcy after running up credit card debt, and it was repeated by outlets that had not checked. Later that year it ran a piece about NASA's Curiosity rover finding stone tablets near Aeolis Mons marked with the Ten Commandments and the phrase I Am Real. That one escaped the site entirely and lived for years as a viral email and a Facebook chain with no attribution attached to it at all.

The best came in January 2014. Days after recreational marijuana became legal in Colorado, the Currant published a story claiming thirty-seven people had died of marijuana overdoses on the first day, with a projected toll of three hundred by the following week. The article named characters from Breaking Bad in among the fictional dead. Beatrice Ask, at the time Sweden's Minister for Justice, cited it in public.

~ the shelf life of a joke ~

A satire site that depends on being believed is a business with a hard ceiling, because every successful hoax teaches part of the audience to check the source, and the format only works while the check is not yet reflexive. By late 2016 the check had become reflexive for the wrong reason. The American election had produced a whole industry of fabricated stories written for ad revenue rather than for the joke, and the word that arrived to describe those was the word that would have described the Currant. Daniel Barkeley stopped posting, and the site was gone before the end of the year without an announcement, which is the quietest possible exit from a room that had just gotten very loud.

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