“The Colbert Report” hits the airwaves soon.
Frankly, I tended to fast-forward through many of Colbert’s bits on “The Daily Show”. I get that what he’s doing is intended to be funny, but at least half the time it just made me feel impatient: ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re skewering self-important, ill-informed newscasters with big egos. Point made. Move on.’
That’s just me, though, and as my husband can tell you, I have a somewhat deficient sense of humor at times. I’ll TiVo the first week to see if he can extend the joke to a full half-hour (less commercials).
Here’s why this matters, even if I don’t find Colbert funny:
When Colbert talks about skewering hypocrites, he makes clear that, like Stewart, he cares about politics as more than a punch line. He recalls Vice President Cheney, in a CNBC interview last year, being asked about having said it was “pretty well confirmed” that terrorist Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi official in Prague — part of a White House attempt to demonstrate a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Cheney denied making the comment, but “The Daily Show” later aired a tape of a 2001 “Meet the Press” interview in which the vice president had said the Atta meeting was “pretty well confirmed.”
“When Dick Cheney says, ‘I never said that,’ and then we play the tape, why did we do it?” Colbert says. “Why wasn’t it done broadly? Because he wasn’t speaking about something inconsequential. It wasn’t like we were playing gotcha journalism over some quibble. It was over weapons of mass destruction. That’s not advocacy journalism. That’s objectivity in its most raw form.”
So why don’t more working journalists do what Stewart and Colbert are doing? Perhaps, Colbert says, “there’s a sense that if they engaged in what we do at ‘The Daily Show,’ they’d be accused of being too aggressive.”
