aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Comedy Central Rumsfeld scoop: another 5th Estate moment
Comedy Central called it first, last night:
The buzz I’m hearing from a friend, and a totally unconfirmed White House source (remember Comedy Central doesn’t have journalistic standards), is that Rumsfeld will be out of the administration tomorrow.
This is a shocker even to the totally unnamed source in the White House. Already, we are seeing reports of a White House Press conference scheduled for tomorrow at 1 p.m. Could this be it?
Yet another reminder of my favorite comment from Robert Thompson on Radio Open Source last May in a program discussing Stephen Colbert’s rising significance. Thompson is Trustee Professor of Television and Popular Culture, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and Founding Director, Center for the Study of Popular Television, Syracuse University:
[34:45] I think what Colbert has proved is that Comedy has moved in as the Fifth Estate when the Fourth Estate had dropped the ball. The press, of course, as others have said, completely rolled over in the lead-up to the war and the only good commentators out there were all coming from the perspective of the support of the president - the Bill O’Reillys, the Rush Limbaughs and so forth and so on - and comedy moved into that vacuum with Jon Stewart, who really started to show his stripes in the coverage of the 2000 election, Indecision 2000 as he called it, now Colbert and even David Letterman has become politicized as a result. [...]
[44:46] When we first heard those polls that so many young people were getting all of their news from late-night comedy, we thought to ourselves, “oh, this is terrible.. how is our next generation of citizenry going to run a representative republic if all of their information is coming from Comedy Central.” You watch something like… [Colbert at The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner] and if you continue to watch Comedy Central shows you get a sense that boy, you know, maybe this isn’t a bad place to be getting some of our news information.
Christopher Lydon responds, “Absolutely dead on!”
