Last week, Oxygen.ie ran an article about the Israeli Embassy in Ireland, tweeting inflammatory remarks about the people of Ireland and their Tánaiste. This of course was published in our Spanner section, the award-winning satirical aspect of our website. This went over the heads of the spokespeople for the Israeli Embassy in Dublin as legal action was threatened against Oxygen.ie if we did not remove the article.
The article in question was poking fun at the fact that the Israeli Embassy’s Twitter account, has been misrepresented on social media sites in the last two weeks with people photoshopping ridiculous statements from the account and passing them off as being true. We joined in on the fun and published an article with the following false tweets,
The article was up on our site for a week before the Israeli Embassy contacted us about it. Some time over the weekend, the article was picked up by Tweeters and was shared on the social media site. When this caught the attention of the embassy, they contacted us by phone to say that, “No Embassy would say that the Tánaiste has a ‘head like a bag of spanners’.” Then we were put under legal threat if we did not remove it immediately from the website.
The Israeli Embassy then appointed themselves as the new purveyors of what quantifies as satire or not, by asking us to, “In future it might be wise to check with us first before permitting threads so patently fake and absurd to take off.” When it was clearly stated that it was satire, the spokesperson said, “It does not matter that a spokesman told me by phone that oxygen is a satirical website, anyone can take seriously what appears on it and as a student website it does have some credibility.”
So, there you go. Student websites are the moral high-ground on what is real news or completely fabricated news for comical effect. In light of this new ethos bestowed onto us by people we have never met before, you can be assured that everything we write in our satirical section will be 100% authentic.
We would also like to apologise to the Tánaiste for comparing her head to a bag full of spanners. This is of course absurd, it more likely resembles a bag of Phillip-head screwdrivers.