aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
The Fifth Estate skewers the Fourth
I’ve been fond of quoting S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications professor and Center for the Study of Popular Television founding director Robert Thompson from Radio Open Source last spring:
[34:45] 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.
Yesterday GMA and The Today Show both did stories on Robert Wexler playing along with Colbert on the topic of cocaine.
Last night Colbert shot back. Before bluntly endorsing Wexler - “my friend” - he went after the network news folks with a comic ferocity that was finely targeted and absolutely 100% effective.
The python that ate the electric blanket, tanorexia, uncomfortable shoes, fake flood shots, getting peed on causes stress, the chimp playing Texas Holdum… all stories he excerpted from those real news shows to illustrate the point.
