aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Colbert watching, dog whistling & the rise of the 5th Estate

Is Comedy Central becoming for the Left what Fox News is to the Right?

The thought never occurred to me but MadCasey makes a compelling case. First we here from NYCO on the dog whistle effect:

If you do a search on “Colbert” on Technorati, you’ll notice that most of the people now talking about Colbert are users of services like Myspace and Livejournal—teenagers, housewives, and people who don’t visit places like Daily Kos on a regular basis.  The fact that his speech has penetrated into the nonpolitical blogosphere is pretty significant. [...]

Also interesting is that really, the right blogosphere just is not talking about him - again, see Technorati. Very few entries slamming him.

The weird thing, which we have already noted here by criticizing the MSM’s ignoring of the Colbert incident, is that for the people in power (and their sycophants, the Right), this was pretty much a non-event. Nothing worth their attention, much less anger. But on the other side, “our” side, the depth of feeling is huge. This is the exact equivalent of what happens when the Right sends out a dog whistle to the Christian conservatives. The Left doesn’t hear it. (And truly, I don’t even think some of “our” people in the blogosphere are hearing the dog whistle of the Colbert incident.)

Casey quotes Yahoo’s Buzz Index:

“Ever since Stephen Colbert opened his mouth at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner and pointedly mocked Bush in front of Bush, online buzz on the fake newsman has reached scalding temperatures.
[snip]

“There’s a boulder-coming-at-Indiana Jones quality to the story now. Searches on the eyebrow-raising comedian are up 5,625% this week and picking up speed. Trajectories for “Colbert speech” and “colbert video” are racing off the chart. And “The Colbert Report,” its fan site Colbert Nation, and the newly created ThankYouStephenColbert.org also launched upward in Buzz.”

(emphasis mine)

An update points to a Judybrowni comment regarding a recent AOL.com poll of the joke noting “that 32 percent of those polled think that the joke about the president’s glass being 32 percent full is not funny. Can’t buy comedy like that, people.”

I’ve concluded that I did find the speech funny (I laughed out loud; not uproariously) but I’ve been more interested to watch the repercussions of the media not covering it.

Among my favorite comments were those from Robert Thompson on Radio Open Source (which, if it were just a tad more blog friendly, would provide transcripts). 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… the Sunday night thing 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!”