Colbert tells truth to power; Ignored by MSM

Mainstream media has ignored Stephen Colber's roast of Bush and the mainstream media at last Saturday night's Correspondents dinner, but not FOX News

DOOCY:Personally I felt like he went over the line. Today in Lloyd Grove’s column, he says that Colbert “bombed badly.” It was not very funny.

Digby agreed - sort of.

I sorry to report that this year, in an alarming lack of decorum, Stephen Colbert went way over the line --- he lampooned the press corps itself in such a way as to make it seem as if they might be partly responsible for why 70% of the nation feels the country is on the wrong track. Making fun of politicians is one thing. They are a slightly lower life form. But the press itself? Implying they are complicit in all this unpleasantness with war and what not? Well, that simply isn't done.

Of course, if you don't go over and read the rest of what Digby said, you may miss the tongue planted firmly in his cheek as he wrote that paragraph.

Then Peter Dauo over at Salon wades in with his description of how the MSM has reacted. His main point is how the Mainstream Media gets to choose what the news is.

The AP's first stab at it and pieces from Reuters and the Chicago Tribune tell us everything we need to know: Colbert's performance is sidestepped and marginalized while Bush is treated as light-hearted, humble, and funny. Expect nothing less from the cowardly American media

But a highly informative piece of writting on the Colbert roast came from a diaryist and self-confessed comedian (dday) at Daily Kos.

What Stephen Colbert did the other night is a textbook example of "playing to the back of the room." It's all the more courageous because there actually wasn't a back of the room there; they were all at home, a few of them watching on C-SPAN, others finding the Quicktime later. [Snip]

I'm not surprised that the right side of the blogosphere has come out and said "Colbert wasn't funny," and used the reaction of the crowd as proof. Everybody on the planet thinks they have a sense of humor and good taste in clothes. It's mathematically impossible that everyone does. I can say from experience that some of my best shows have been the ones that could rightly be described as bombing. Almost always after one of those shows someone comes up and says "I thought you were awesome." Certainly that is not the state of comedy today. Today's "anything for a laugh" comedy of Dane Cook and others has at its core a belief that failure is not an option. Colbert understood that failure is not failure.

That was the edgiest, bravest set I've seen since the death of Bill Hicks. The only quibble Hicks would have had with it was that he did it in the first place. "Those shitheels don't deserve to have that much truth thrown in their face," I could imagine him saying. But it was entirely necessary, in my view. There are two different kinds of satire, Horatian and Juvenalian. Juvenalian satire attacks folly in very direct terms. Horatian satire presents folly for what it is, and is generally seen as more gentle. But it's not in the hands of a master satirist. Colbert is a Horatian satirist, taking on the persona of the right-wing blowhard in order to expose its lunacy from within. It's one thing to tell an anti-Bush joke, it's another thing to espouse a pro-Bush line of reasoning and have that be the joke itself; the former is just a joke, while the latter attacks an entire worldview and crushes it.[Underlining mine - RB]

Ultimately I think that this is one of those rare forms of political humor in which the reaction of the various audiences will be as significant as the biting humor itself was. In some ways, there is going to be a difference in the way American politics was reported BC (before Colbert) and AC (after Colbert.) Colbert has not changed politics but he certainly has put a different seasoning on them.

I'll be watching.