The year we got Punk’d What did we learn from Jessica Lynch, Jayson Blair, and Ashton Kutcher? The joke’s on us. BY CAMILLE DODERO

The premise of Punk’d, MTV’s Candid Camera–style series, goes like this: host Ashton Kutcher — goofball pin-up and breakout star of That ’70s Show — dons a hipster trucker cap, sequesters himself in a monitor-equipped control room, and makes stupid faces at the camera while explaining the elaborate set-up of the practical joke he’s about to pull off. Meanwhile, unsuspecting celebrity victims like Tommy Lee, Halle Berry, and Beyoncé Knowles find themselves in embarrassing situations in which motor-vehicle chaos ensues, prized possessions appear smashed or repossessed, or someone randomly gets naked. Confronted with such predicaments, the chagrined star freaks out, gasps, argues, sometimes even threatens violence. If the dupee was once in a boy band (e.g., Justin Timberlake, Nick Carter), he’s exposed as a weenie and nearly weeps on-camera. But just before fists fly, boys cry, or luxury belongings break, Kutcher dashes out of his hiding place, squeezes the prank victim like a drunk football fan hugging a stranger after his team wins the Super Bowl, and yells something along the lines of "You’ve been Punk’d!"

It’s an apt metaphor for 2003, a year of false premises, mischievous tricks, and sneaky deception, a year when hoodwinking became a national pastime. On an international scale, specious rhetoric became grounds for war. On television, gullible girls clawed each other for a man they believed to be moneyed who was really a construction worker raking in $19,000. And some headline-grabbing stories were so ludicrous, they seemed like gags — like the one about the Hollywood action hero with no political experience who becomes governor of California. So when Kutcher recently announced that he’d be "hanging up his punkin’ hat" this December, it seemed like a fitting finale for 2003.

Practical jokes, by definition, require misrepresentation of the truth. And in 2003, truth seemed more slippery, more evasive, more twisted than ever. Attorney General John Ashcroft embarked on a national public-relations tour to defend the USA Patriot Act, but contrary to the spirit of the democracy he was supposedly upholding, the right-wing Missourian refused to answer questions or engage in public dialogue about his law. On the journalistic front, the Gray Lady nearly went bald when a young, sharp-elbowed New York Times reporter deliberately and repeatedly conjured up facts for his stories, but still continued to get assignments. And when President Bush visited troops in Iraq on Thanksgiving Day, the glistening turkey he held for photo opportunities was artificial, a prop, another useless toy plucked from joke-shop bins. The golden bird on Bush’s platter might as well have been a rubber chicken — because in 2003, the joke was always on us.

THE MOTHER of all pranks was a global gag called "weapons of mass destruction." Our fearless leader presented a case for war against Iraq based chiefly on the allegation that Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein had violated UN agreements by secretly manufacturing said WMD. According to the Bush administration, the mustachioed madman not only had the capability to manufacture 500 tons of sarin, mustard gas, and VX nerve agents, but had also tried to snag enriched uranium from Africa. And while no one could argue that the dirty dictator with more body doubles than Julia Roberts was anything other than a malevolent megalomaniac who had given the finger to UN weapons inspectors, these sins still weren’t reason enough to tear up his country.

But the sheer menace of the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" was enough to rally the support of a populace haunted by the nasty prospect of terrorism. After all, curbside entrepreneurs still peddle framed images of the Twin Towers on the streets near Ground Zero; clearly, 9/11 remains emotionally raw enough to motivate a nation. So the Bush administration coupled the WMD claim with repeated insinuations that the Iraqi government was somehow connected to September 11. The world wasn’t buying it, but the government didn’t care. Bush invaded, holding a picture of daddy in one hand and Tony Blair’s palm in the other.

By last summer, it sure looked like we’d been bamboozled. American troops had been trampling all over Iraq for months without uncovering the WMD. And the Al Qaeda/Iraq connection? As the National Journal wrote last August, "Three former Bush Administration officials who worked on intelligence and national security issues said the prewar evidence tying Al Qaeda was tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies." In retrospect, the whole affair appears to be little more than the artful rhetoric of a demagogue pursuing a familial vendetta.

Among the unwitting pawns in this whole mess was a fair-haired lass named Jessica Lynch. Serving her country for college money — ultimately, she wanted to teach kindergarten — Lynch had the misfortune of being in a convoy ambushed in the Iraqi town of Nasiriya. The Army supply clerk, we were told, went down fighting like a champ, bravely firing at the enemy in a blaze of glory until her ammunition ran out. The sole survivor in her group, Lynch was taken prisoner by vicious enemy captors, beaten, and abused. When American Special Ops forces rescued her from an Iraqi military hospital, it was such a victory that the mission was filmed like a scene from a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.

As it turns out, the whole thing was another ruse. As Lynch regained consciousness and slowly recuperated, she no longer wanted government mouthpieces to do the talking for her. In her first interview, with Diane Sawyer, she immediately cast off the mantle of "hero," preferring to be called a "survivor." She also denied the previously reported details of her capture, admitting that her gun had jammed during the ambush and that she’d never even fired in defense. Although a medical examination suggested she’d been raped while in captivity, Lynch didn’t remember being harmed in the hospital at all, recalling instead a kind woman who sang at her bedside at night. But the biggest contrivance of all? The cinematic nature of her rescue was just that: staged theatrics. Why else was a camera crew in tow?

Among those seeking to capitalize on Lynch’s Iraq experience was con man Jayson Blair. Gossipy and wildly ambitious, the 27-year-old African-American New York Times reporter was sent to interview Jessica Lynch’s family at their West Virginia home. But the coke-sniffing careerist never quite made it south. Instead, he used information cobbled together from various sources to file an ersatz story, complete with a big fat whopper about sitting together on the family’s porch overlooking "tobacco fields and cattle pastures" — a rich detail conceived miles away in his Brooklyn apartment. But this imaginary element wasn’t even Blair’s most egregious sin — turns out he’d plagiarized, lied, turned in sloppy stories, even falsified expense reports to appear that he’d actually left his Brooklyn digs to chase down assignments when he’d really been at home, likely eating Cheetos in his underwear.

Like his fellow tricksters of 2003, Blair was remorseless. When he finally spoke about his misdeeds to the New York Observer, he seemed downright boastful and unrepentant, even though he’d given a "black eye" to the New York Times, ruined careers, and disgraced professional journalism. During the interview, he even laughed about the tobacco-fields-and-cow-pastures lie, saying they were among his "favorite" fabrications. Once again, the joke was on us. With a mid-six-figure book deal in the works, Jayson Blair is clearly the last one laughing.

ASHTON KUTCHER wasn’t the only one punking old pals in 2003. Al Gore left his onetime running mate and current presidential wanna-be Joe Lieberman with a greasy omelet on his face when the former vice-president endorsed reformed ski bum Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination. Lieberman confessed his "surprise" on the Today show; meanwhile, a spokesman for the Connecticut senator quipped that they’d removed Gore’s name from the short list for Lieberman’s VP slot. Alas for Joe, who’d been so eager to shoot his own party in the foot by proclaiming that "the Bush recession would be followed by the Dean depression," poll data made it painfully clear that Lieberman’s own mother was probably reconsidering her vote in the wake of Gore’s endorsement.

People didn’t just punk their chums in 2003; they punked their enemies, too. Openly gay syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage punked homophobic Senator Rick Santorum after the latter publicly equated gay sex with incest and adultery. An appalled Savage started a campaign to turn Santorum’s name into a neologism for a sex-related act, which his readers decided should be "the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex." While Santorum hasn’t publicly commented on the fact that his name has new meaning, the term’s catching on: creative bartenders have concocted Santorum Shots; a band playing at CBGB in New York performed the "Dan Savage Sex Advice Column Blues"; and www.extraugly.com has created a line of Santorum-related T-shirts, including one pointing out that SANTORUM TASTES LIKE SHIT.

Some punks involved old rivals who found new ways to make each other look foolish. It goes without saying that Republicans punked the Democrats over and over this year, but the punk with the greatest repercussions was the California recall election. Although Democratic governor Gray Davis had made a mess of the state, liberals had no hope of picking up the pieces once the Republicans brought out a big gun: Arnold Schwarzenegger — a/k/a the Kindergarten Cop, Mr. Freeze, Conan the Barbarian. When Schwarzenegger took office, he reduced his gubernatorial responsibilities to a weightlifting metaphor, which was in some senses a final turn of the knife: "There’s a massive weight we must lift off our state," he said during his inaugural address. "Alone, I cannot lift it. But together, we can." Someone, please squeeze a rubber horn.

As always, the rich continued to prank the poor — like when the greedy RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) tried to stop file-sharing over the Internet by suing hundreds of online traders for copyright infringement, holding each liable for up to $150,000 a song. Peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa and Napster had become Robin Hood–like technologies, tools for the underprivileged to steal from the fat cats who’d even ’fessed up to price gouging. But when the RIAA sued, the defendants were mostly clueless, dumbfounded parents who either had no idea that their kids were downloading music from the Web or didn’t realize that such innocuous clicking could have such severe consequences. The RIAA even subpoenaed a 12-year-old girl living in a New York City Housing Authority apartment and a 71-year-old Texan whose grandsons had downloaded music files onto his PC during a visit.

And once again, the New York Yankees punked the Boston Red Sox, adding the curse of the Bambino to the arrogance of Pedro Martinez and the poor decision-making of Grady Little. As one local fan noted, there were so many people cursing when the Yankees hit their winning homerun, the city of Boston sounded like a gaggle of geese: "Fock! Fock! Fock!"

KUTCHER WASN’T the only one on television peddling false premises. On CNN’s America Rocks the Vote, a youth-oriented special held at Boston’s Faneuil Hall that featured a handpicked audience of 18-to-30-year-old voters, the idea was supposedly to open an honest dialogue between young people and the presidential candidates. But a week later, a Brown University freshman who’d proffered the silly question, "Macs or PCs?" told the press that she’d previously submitted a more serious inquiry, but had been handed the other at the last minute. Producers nixed her original question "because it wasn’t lighthearted enough, and they wanted to modulate the event with various types of questions."

Initially, it appeared that the candid-camera joke was on Paris Hilton when a two-and-a-half-year-old videotape of her having sex with an old beau found its way onto the Internet. But the timing of the tape’s release — right before the prime-time debut of Hilton’s down-home, fish-out-of-water reality show, The Simple Life — began to seem awfully convenient. Three months ago, few Americans who weren’t US Weekly subscribers or "Page Six" devotees could identify the oldest Hilton sister. But once the world saw the svelte scion vamping naked for a video camera, everyone from Maine to Oregon could trace the curvature of Hilton’s breast. Fox got itself quite a nice PR boost for The Simple Life, and Paris Hilton’s more famous than ever.

In the manufactured genre of reality television, false premises were much more blatant. Wanna-be actors gagging on mutated sheep’s eyeballs for money became too predictable, so trickery became the trend. A pioneer in televised duplicity, Fox’s Joe Millionaire saw pulchritudinous gold-diggers cat-fighting for a tall, dark dude they were told was filthy rich, but who was actually — get this! — a construction worker pulling in $19,000 annually. The ruses continued with Joe Schmo, a Spike TV series in which a goofy-looking "regular guy" thought he’d been cast on a reality-television show called Lap of Luxury, when in actuality the entire thing was created with him as the unwitting subject — his fellow contestants were all actors.

On Survivor: Pearl Islands, the 16 contestants — wearing everything from an Armani suit to a Boy Scout uniform — thought they were dressed for a pre-show photo shoot, but in truth the game was about to begin. Ten episodes later, the best bud of contestant Jon materialized bearing terrible news: Jon’s grandmother had died. Jon’s face crumpled. Seeing his pain, Jon’s rivals took pity on him, letting him win a "reward challenge" so he could hang with his friend and learn more about his grandma’s death. Later, Jon merrily admitted that his grandmother was still alive, probably at home "watching Jerry Springer," and that he’d planned the scam with his pal ahead of time. Treacherous? Yep. But Jon clearly knew something his cast mates didn’t: deception was the code of conduct in 2003.

AT THE END of the year, we’re all still smarting from whichever prank punked us best. No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. There is no apparent connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California. Rick Santorum is still a United States senator. The Boston Red Sox didn’t win the World Series — again. The turkey in the photo is still a fake. All in all, it’s enough to make you wish someone would emerge from a hidden back room, squeeze you like a drunk football fan, and shout, "You’ve been Punk’d!"

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com