Colbertgate Resolved
Some day, I think, people will find it truly strange that one of the signal controversies of our era concerned how funny a comedy routine by Steven Colbert was. I've lacked the resources to adequately wend through the ensuing arguments and what they revealed. James Wood, however, absolutely nails it here. I'll quote the best part since non-subscribers can't read it:
Obviously enough, this is designed not to amuse, but to wound, to goad, to irritate. It is not comedy; the discourse has moved location, from the funhouse to the church, and it has become preachy and a little earnest. We are in the realm of the blogosphere. Again and again, Colbert chides the MSM in much the way that the alternative press does: "John McCain, John McCain, what a maverick! Somebody find out what fork he used on his salad, because I guarantee you, it wasn't a salad fork. This guy could have used a spoon! There's no predicting him." Actually, this last jibe is pretty funny, and it neatly pops both John McCain's ballooning self-regard and the tedious reverence of the establishment media.
And, pleasingly, the MSM have responded with delicious displays of their own inability to read. Richard Cohen, in a recent column in The Washington Post about how unfunny and "rude" Colbert was, commented on the following Colbert passage: "So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, 'Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.' First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!" On this, Cohen expounds: "A mixed metaphor, and lame as can be." Ah, Mr. Cohen, high-schoolers study "irony" in their English classes so as to avoid slips like yours. Remember your Chaucer? First of all, Colbert is supposed to be in character as a defender of the administration: His metaphor is deliberately comically inefficient. Second, the apparently "mixed metaphor" is itself a commentary on the "terrible" Titanic metaphor--it is supposed to be a second "terrible" metaphor, squared. Third, isn't this quite a nice dig at the stylistic laziness, the verbal narcosis, of most political commentary--of precisely the kind practiced by Cohen? (Perhaps it takes a terrible metaphor to recognize a mixed one.)
So we have a heaven-made circularity: Colbert, abjuring comedy for bitter irony, attacks the MSM like the bloggers do; the MSM decide not to mention Colbert, or decide that he wasn't funny, or was rude; and the bloggers get to cry foul, charging that this shows, at best, exactly what is wrong with the cloth-eared MSM--or, at worst, that a conspiracy to silence Colbert has begun. At which point the MSM, in their stolid, evenhanded way, write up the "controversy." Who can blame the bloggers? They are right that Colbert was often not trying to be funny, but to be insulting--and there is something breathtakingly, sublimely insulting about the way Colbert, in the midst of his rudeness, continues to use the words "sir" and "Mr. President" not ten feet from the man he is dressing down. And, if they are not right about a conspiracy of silence, they are right about the press's reflexive respect for authority, for only this can explain the chummy way in which, say, The New York Times first reported the event, with its relaxed and relaxing account of the comic genius of Steve Bridges (he was prepped in the White House!).
As Wood goes on to observe, there's something uniquely American about the idea that the primary role of the newspaperman is to be boring and deferential. In other countries (or in the NYC tabloid market) where papers face actual competition instead of being organized as a series of local monopolies, the general idea is for your paper to be something that someone would want to read instead of being like a plate of brocoli that you ought to read.
This isn't to say that reporters never challenge the powerful or break big stories. Obviously they do, at least sometimes. But even when reporters are doing their best work, the height of journalistic achievement in America is to uncover a big outreageous scandal and then successfully cloak your outrage behind the canons of stodgy neutrality. It's bizarre. Every successful innovation in political media for decades -- from talk radio to Fox News to the blogosphere to the Colbert Report and the Daily Show -- has been premised on trying to take the ideas and information and transmit them in an appealing way. It's no coincidence that these innovations all come out of media ecologies where there's competition.
The one real concession to feistiness the MSM has made was to decide that everyone was entitled, after all, to get indignant about the fact that Bill Clinton got a blowjob. But that was okay because it wasn't "serious." Weighty matters of state -- lies leading to wars, torture, illegal surveillance, massive corruption -- that all needs to be handled with delicacy and politeness.
I like broccoli.
May 11, 2006 9:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
You find preachy righteousness and outrage and feistiness more appealing than the appearance of stodgy neutrality or cynicism? I'm surprised.
Once upon a time, I was under the impression that the blogosphere was gonna be a sophisticated alternative to the talk radio-ization and emotional tabloid-ization of all news. Boy was I a fool.
"Smackdowns" forever? Bill O'Reilly a genius to be imitated?
Interesting. I have an entirely different take on this. After WWII, the U.S. became the center of the media world. In that center, people decided that maybe they could make a new profession, called journalism, that they would attempt to report news in depth and striving for objectivity, beyond basic wire reports spun by the ink-stained inflammatory ideological Fleet Street wretches and demagogue's broadsides. Ya know, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, et. al. It's wasn't American, it just happened in America. Well, that's over. In the history books, Rupert Murdoch wins the half-century round.
May 11, 2006 9:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, naturally: the Republicans locked up the anti-broccoli voting bloc almost 20 years ago.
May 11, 2006 9:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Once upon a time, I was under the impression that the blogosphere was gonna be a sophisticated alternative to the talk radio-ization and emotional tabloid-ization of all news.
Part of the reason you are wrong, I think, is that blogs emerged out of the same pondwater as modern American journalism, and are competing for the same food.
I agree with you about the great days of American journalism, and I'd hate to see us throw out the broccoli for the pork rinds of, say, Gilded Age standards of reporting. But there is something excessively stodgy or else fakey about the reporting we get. The idea that good journalism breaks a story like the NSA spying thing with a garb of neutrality is problematic; on the other hand, the way that reporters with major media outlets sometimes put on a show of outrage at Katrina was most unconvincing. Blogs took off in part because the appearance of objectivity is starting to outrun objectivity itself, and in a way, I think the medium inevitably tips in the direction that talk radio has also gone. In a way, it's another iteration of the American yearning for a simpler time.
In between the poles of turn-of-the-century broadsides and turn-of-the-millenium blandness is something like real, honest, compelling journalism, and while neither pole catches it, a swing towards the former might get us back to the golden mean. Murrow and Cronkite, after all, were known not only for their intellectual rigor, but also their ability to show some teeth, when needed, in pursuit of truth.
May 11, 2006 9:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Matt, absolutely right about US newspapers. Read the Guardian, the Independent, even the Times or Torygraph (er, Telegraph) -- just across the pond, and you'll find a lot of things that a "family" newspaper won't publish.
Come on, newspaper publishers: any kid who's old enough to read the NY Times, Philadelphia Inquirer or any other major paper can stand language that people actually use.
And, yes, competition of a national newspaper market makes the newspapers far more interesting to read. Imagine a major US newspaper having a campaign to decriminalize marijuana each week. Well, the Sunday Independent did. (It didn't work, but it sure got some readership).
May 11, 2006 10:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
The mixing of politics and news in the blogosphere, the affiliation with political party, is where the problem is. There are few that are professionally oriented, most are politically oriented. It is exactly the same as ye olden Fleet Street, every media person represented a political party or an interest of some kind and everything was skewed. The idea was that you had to read numerous publications from all sides to get towards truth. This is not an efficient way to inform the public, especially in an age where time is ever more precious. This is why you will more and more get what the left often complains about: an "uninformed public." The problem is they are informed by their favorite talk radio station or blog and don't have time to venture to others. All this was a great curse to the past, a demagogue's toy (three word example, one of many: William Randolph Hearst) and we are just recreating it.
"The Future of Journalism as Told by Hilaire Belloc in 1918" ... By VERLYN KLINKENBORG. Published: April 18, 2006.
Where confusion comes in is that what people expect from the role of what is called "the fourth estate" and the role of free speech, they are no longer the same thing. The First Amendment ends up as a Supreme Court subject all the time because it was written at a time when all the masses had was broadsides and handbills and stump speeches, and all the elite had was opinionated rags. By the 20th century, we had come to expect someone to offer products with a try at factual information in opposition to all the opinion, someone to sort it all out for us what the politicians said, because it's a big frigging world and one person cannot read it all. We need free speech and we need a fourth estate, but they are really have two different purposes now.
May 11, 2006 10:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
oh and on this:
Just mho: An Oscar Wilde he's not. Too much bitter, not enough irony. Matter of fact, methinks Oscar would have found him a fine target.
I'd really like to know if Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame laughed aloud or even smiled, or even found it politically useful, or if they, too, drummed their fingers on the table dying to leave. Really I would.
May 11, 2006 10:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't disagree with you - for the most part, the blogosphere is (if you think that the purpose of it is to provide information, anwyay) a return to Hearst, Fleet Street and all the rest. But it also contains the germ of what is missing now, and which distinguishes todays journalism from that of the mid-century heyday. (Heyday? Hayday? Where'd this stupid word come from, anyway)
My point isn't that that blogs are great, it's that they might exert a pressure towards the kind of journalism that you rightly laud. This is true for two reasons. First, together with talk radio etc., they provide a new shade of yellow for mainstream journalism to react to, and to the extent that the blog phenomenon turns out to be crummy, it might still force the journalistic establishment back 50 years just to provide an alternative to news outlets that take us back 100 years.
Second, there are some really great journalists working in the blogosphere, and to that they gain readers, there should be some pressure on big media (newspapers, anyway) to match their intellectual rigor in order to remain competitive.
So are blogs great for having an informed public? Depends on which ones you read. But to the extent that they exert a pull from the other pole, I think it might have a healthy effect on news as a whole.
Of course, the other way to defend blogs, if that was what I was up to here, is to deny that they are really about news, in the sense of disseminating factual information. For my part, I do get a fair amount of my news from blogs these days (well, the TPM empire), with all the good and bad that this brings, but I come not for the facts but for the argument. In politics, facts matter less than what you do with them, how you aggregate them, manipulate them if needs be, and otherwise build arguments and theories rather than just a collection of news stories. Maybe what is happening here isn't so much about informed citizens as it is about developing better mechanisms for developing political arguments, creating consensus, etc. Whether blogs can or will do that, I don't know. But I do think that part of the problem you see is that what's going on here isn't really about the news.
May 11, 2006 10:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is not an efficient way to inform the public, especially in an age where time is ever more precious.
But the 40 or so year experiement we conducted where we tried to make an efficient way to inform the public has failed spectacularly. It might be inefficient in the extreme, though for those who care and can budget the time to do so, it works extremely well, this reading all sides to get a sense of the truth is I think the only path we can possibly hope to tread unless people (read journalists, editors and publishers) stop caring about money, access and influence.
(Interestingly enough, the system has failed spectacularly in part because the GOP partisans convinced many people that the system had failed before it really did fail causing the system to fail.)
May 11, 2006 10:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
It is exactly the same as ye olden Fleet Street, every media person represented a political party or an interest of some kind and everything was skewed. The idea was that you had to read numerous publications from all sides to get towards truth. This is not an efficient way to inform the public, especially in an age where time is ever more precious.
The move to "professional journalism" (i.e., objective) wasn't about doing some kind of public service to better inform the public.
Companies running the press figured out that they'd sell more papers by playing the middle.
Play that out a few more years, add in the corporatization and conglomeration of the news media, remove Equal Time laws, and we end up where we are today: a news media that serves the bottom line, not the people.
We cannot go back to some notion of journalism in the public interest, the days of Cronkite, without reform.
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May 11, 2006 11:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm a bit perplexed by Wood's judgment that while Colbert was ironic, satirical and brutal, and his performance was filed with a "brilliant, relntless flow of bitterest invective" and "plenty of funny cracks", that somehow that performance does not fall into the category of comedy.
Personally, I laughed very, very heartily when I watched Colbert's performance - my wife had to come investigate. I guess I must be so sadistically bitter and blogospherically deranged that I actually laugh at clever satirical jabs that hit the mark, and don't see any inherent contrast between comedy and satire that is "wounding", "goading" and "irritating". Before reading Wood, I would have assumed that the best satire is always wounding, goading and irritating, and that satire was universally recognized as one form of comedy. Boy, was I wrong!
I now know that there is something twisted and perverse about my personal laugh responses, which all along I had erroneously assumed to be attuned to things that are funny. Hardly! Consider Wood:
But more interesting are those moments when Colbert's text is not funny: "I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that, no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound--with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world." As comedy, this is fairly feeble, and even less funny is Colbert's scolding of the press: "Over the last five years, you people were so good--over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out."
I laughed when I first heard those lines, and just laughed again when I reread them and typed them - perhaps in part because I read them along with my mental image of Colbert delivering them in the earnestly bloviating, hectoring tones favored by his character. My God, what's wrong with me?! Please help me before I laugh again at what is manifestly non-comedic material.
In the process of demonstrating conclusively that what Colbert was doing is not comedy - "because the discourse has moved location, from the funhouse to the church, and it has become preachy and a little earnest" - Wood cites the John McCain joke gag jest statement, apparently as evidence of Colbert's non-comical intent and effect, before concluding "Actually, this last jibe is pretty funny..." This attests to some uneveness in Colbert's performance. For it seems that while Colbert was broadly successful in sticking to the unfunny, wounding, goading, irritating, biting, jabbing, steaming invective in his Theater of Pain, he occasionally slipped into some awkward and inapproapriate funniness.
I admit I am still struggling to get a grip on Wood's idiosyncratic conception of the comic arts. (Does slipping on a banana peel count?) But Wood has successfully convinced me, in this brilliant piece of hipper than tommorrow cultural criticism, that he is above the seductions of mere laughter.
May 11, 2006 11:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
You are rightly pointing out the possible positive scenarios.
I will point out one of the most ominous ones, in my mind. The spontaneous organization of email "lynch mobs" (topic raised again by Richard Cohen, about, ta-dah, a Colbert pan--Dan's post on it here; direct link here) out of like-minded blogosphere denizens often gets amazingly close to the process described in Gustave LeBon's The Crowd, a book which an old cultural history prof and expert on 20th-C totalitarian movements, especially fascism, George Mosse, used to like to push as the sort of "guidebook" for many of the demagogues and dictators of the 20th century. (His argument about Le Bon was actually more nuance, that his work encapsulated what everyone in power was starting to realize at the turn of the century about the power of the new field of pyschology.)
The campaigns are filled with emotional knee-jerk reactions, enabled by the ease and quickness of email, and, whether or not intended, end up striking a note of fear in the recipient, the intimidation factor is there. There's a fine line here, I know, with organized political pressure and mobs, but when one side starts to feel lynched and the other side starts to feel warm and fuzzy all over about humiliating the "enemy" with a spontaneously formed emotional outburst, no thoughtfulness involved, just raw emotion, it seems crossed to mob to me. That a single pundit's opinion can arouse such anger and fervor (in this case in support of a comedian) seems to me an unhealthy situation from the getgo. Like the old "bread and circuses" thing, keeping the people busy with Christians vs. lions.
It's not left or right for me, I felt the same thing, the same creepy relationship to mob, with the freepers campaign against Dan Rather.
Yes, I know, sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never harm you, but this is indeed how marches to war and other violence starts. Someone like William Randolph Hearst did exactly the same thing. Many on the left argue that the MSM enabled the Bush administration to do the same thing, riling up hatred for arabs and other illogical emotional reactions etc.
Josh Marshall actually touched some upon this "lynching" thing by quoting a journalist friend a few weeks back who responded to his post about Mick McCurry's anti-blog anger by describing being not just spammed with emails but stalked etc. He said he would pick up the topic again but I didn't see him do so, perhaps he will now with the Richard Cohen column.
If Cohen is right, it is only self-destructive behavior because the majority of our population eventually punishes shrill mobs one way or another. But will that always be so? Will we Balkanize into a bunch of echo chamber mobs? Easily manipulated by a leader? (I know the use of the word "Kossacks" is meant to be ironic, but how many members there dare to challenge him? What happens to those that do?)
May 11, 2006 11:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
What's particularly disturbing about these scenarios is that they aren't confined to the blogosphere. Well, email as a tool of harassment is kind of special, but the overall balkanization seems like it extends well beyond those who get their news from this specific source. Certainly, the anger and intolerance is broader (and more from right than left, as far as I can tell). So to that extent, the social forces at work behind these trends are deeper and stronger than just the blogosphere itself. So I'd say yeah, let's go ahead and worry.
May 11, 2006 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you are warped then so am I as I found it very funny. It was the irony that made it funny. However, what I don't quite understand is when Bush did the skit showing him looking for WMD around the White House even as people were dying in Iraq why was that funny?
Daniel A. Greenbaum
May 11, 2006 12:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Devon and Artappraiser's discussion is very interesting. I am still trying to get my terms straight. Is Talking Points Memo a blog? Josh there seems to be reporting using the web as a space to disseminate information that mightnoth otherwise have an outlet.
The phenomena first noticed on the Left about talk radio is the alternative universe of facts and the ability, as Artappraiser notes, to generate a mob in reaction to a sense of being under attack. This is want the fascists did in France and Germany between the world wars. This trend has expanded with the use of the Web in a bigger way and the advent of Fox News. Is there any doubt those who get most of their news from Fox and those who don't have different senses of what the facts are?
The momentum for this split view came with Bush coming to office. The Russell Shorto article in the New York Times Magazine highlighted how unattached to facts and expertise this administration is. A point reenforced by the New York Timnes discussion of the many books about the Bush Administration.
However, what is a bit distressing that some of the same behavior, alternative facts, mob mentality can be and is found on the Left. I certainly don't expect the Left to be saintly or immune from human behavior. However, it would be hoped that there would a greater sense of goodwill less questioning of motives and greater civility on the Left. Perhaps not on moral grounds but on practical grounds. What Liberals and Progressives want to accomplish is more than just say no. It requires thought and complication. The only way to achieve that is with open debate that is not vulgar and personal but spirited and challenging.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
May 11, 2006 12:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
I would think that many people believe the MSM has gone too far in attempting to be "objective" and "neutral". Striving for neutrality seems to prevent many from saying that the emperor has no clothes even when he is, in fact, stark naked. And not saying that out loud may be neutral and polite and dignified, but it isn't helpful.
I'm guessing that lots of people appreciated Colbert's "show" not because it was funny, but because he said things that needed to be said. If the Grand Viziers won't speak the truth, the court jester needs to do it.
May 11, 2006 12:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
What was so rude about Colbert's routine? I just don't see how this conventional wisdom emerged that Colbert wasn't trying to be funny, but just insulting. Many of those jokes appeared on his show before and got HUGE laughs, delivered in precicely the same way. What made the routine seem "off" was the crickets in the audience. It's difficult to find a comedy routine funny when you get nothing but the uncomfortable creaking of chairs in the background. But this comedy was hardly out-of-bounds for a roast.
They got when Colbert delivers every night. There was no political motivation other than to deliver his material. Either you get it, or you don't. His audience does. The press doesn't. End of story.
May 11, 2006 1:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, Josh's TPM is a blog.
The difference, I think, between the right and left "online lynch mobs" is that the BlogLeft is "attacking" specific journalists who are lazy, or ratify right-wing memes, etc.
The BlogRight is attacking the concept of journalism itself.
BlogLeft wants journalists to do a better job, BlogRight wants journalists to go away.
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May 11, 2006 1:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting discussion but I wanted to jump in and respond to this:
"Easily manipulated by a leader? (I know the use of the word "Kossacks" is meant to be ironic, but how many members there dare to challenge him? What happens to those that do?)"
with a hearty chuckle. Kos gets challenged all the time and that diary usually floats to the top of the recommended list. I watched the latest blogginghead diavlog the other day and Mickey Kaus had the same thought about Kos as some sort of cult leader. As an active lurker in the Kos community this strikes me as really funny. Daily Kos is huge not because of Marcus, its founder, but almost solely because of the technology. Marcus pretty much invented the diary thing and invested in making it work better and better. Thus his blog is huge. But if he suddenly never showed up again and handed the infrastructure over to someone else, it would hardly matter.
This fundamental misunderstanding of DailyKos is rampant I believe, but the site is about the community not about any one person. The great thing about blogs is that ideas emerge from thousands of different people. There may be an echo chamber but the original voice varies considerably. It is quite democratic in that regard.
May 11, 2006 1:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
I really care little to ponder about the etiquette of news. It has its place but not to the degree that you guys take it to be. News--to me--is essentially transmission of factual information. There is an overabundance of this stuff all around us, so we have to chose. It helps if the info is interesting and useful to a large audience. There are many things that would be interesting, disturbing, alarming...etc. to a large audience, which are probably better left unsaid. Where do you draw the line? The emergence of more outlets for news transmission is inherently helpful. The blogosphere emerged not because of some deficiency in the msm, but because the internet made it possible to do so. The relatonship between the msm and the blogosphere as far as content is concerned is another matter. I don't quite agree with artappraiser that Colbert was engaged in merely smackdown journalism. I recall the gratuitous journalism that Bill Clinton had to endure for what? lying about a blowjob under oath. Now that kind of smackdown journalism I despise. However, what Colbert did was justified given the prescient nature of his remarks. Also, the blogosphere is not excessively monolithic like the MSM tends to be. As a general rule, the more outlets the better. Let the people sort out the wheat from the chafe. Alas, there is no other god of content to guide us through our journey.
May 11, 2006 1:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
The point of Colbert's comedy was that the studied air of indifference to politics and the reporting of fact as a political football is something that breaks down in the face of systematic lying like we are seeing by today's Republican Party and the Bush Administration. In the environment, the attempt to be 'apolitical' is political, because it lends legitimacy and gravity to cheating and farce. While I appreciate the technique and thought that goes into artappraiser's lipsticking of the pig by citing LeBon in defense of Bush's pearl clutching defenders, his critiques are much more appropriately directed towards the slavish, hapless devotion that Republicans have shown, their willingness to abandon fact and objectivity in a wholesale way to attain political goals they often are unaware of.
May 11, 2006 1:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Colbert was performing comedy but he wasn't funny. At least funny in the sense that he was going to elicit laughs from his direct audience. That wasn't going to happen no matter how good the comedy was (and it was pretty good) because of the situation.
I'm surprised I haven't read about this yet, but nobody laughed because laughter occurs in occasions of social bonding. When the honored guest is being laughed at beyond playful jabs but into the arena of a personal failure, there will be no laughter, even if some despise the honored guest because there is no bond created. Remove the honored guest and things change substantially of course. This is true even of a Comedy Roast. You can chide the celebrity about all sorts of things but if he or she is currently in rehab fighting a heroin problem, it wouldn't be funny to make a joke about it. Chiding the president about his speech and generic political behavior is one thing, but pointing out that he is really a terrible president is a whole other step. Colbert went to the latter and entertained me immensely and made his direct audience very uncomfortable. It was brave and risky and thus more powerful.
May 11, 2006 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
oh dear me, I certainly wasn't trying to do that!...truth be told, I have always had quite a bit of nearly irrational prejudice against pearly preppy types, blech...back to re-read Strunk and White or Strategies of Rhetoric or something, my communication skills are failing woefully...
Can you at least tolerate someone who isn't into your level of anger in your midst? Is it ok that I don't think of Colbert as genius, that I yearn for a different kind of leftist political humor, one that wins people over rather than alienates into passionate "us" vs. "them"?
How low do Bush's numbers have to go, how many swings lost, how many conservative revolts against him have to happen, before you can let go of rants about that? Want some of those votes for your guy or not? Stop talking about the past.
May 11, 2006 1:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
artappraiser-
"Let go of that"?
I'm sorry, you're a twittering songbird completely disconnected from reality if you think it's time to 'let go of' the fact that behind Bush and the GOP we have a movement that is purely constructed on the basis of LeBon's ugly crowd dynamics. Your attempt to tongue-cluck and shake your head at political action that seeks to counteract that with some collective activity is revolting.
May 11, 2006 1:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
On Colbert himself as comedy, his routine was a solid B on the cleverness scale, raised to an A because of his moxie in delivering it on a podium with the notably vindictive Man-child In Chief Bush.
The point isn't whether he was 'funny' or not - that's going to be extremely subjective with political humor. I found him funny because he was saying such audaciously true, vicious things to the pitiful shell of a human being who occupied the stage with him.
My point, artappraiser, is that by citing mob psychology on the part of those who enjoyed the comedy on this level you are basically just expressing flat out scorn and dismissal of those of us who you allegedly 'want to be in the midst of'. Why should we tolerate the presence of some Johnny come lately ex-Republican douchebag who's going to sneer at us? Why should we have to kiss your ass to get you to agree to no longer be part of the problem?
May 11, 2006 2:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why should we tolerate the presence of some Johnny come lately ex-Republican douchebag who's going to sneer at us? Why should we have to kiss your ass to get you to agree to no longer be part of the problem?
Man, you really need to calm down. I think that you're interpretation of Art's comments is overblown, and in any case, can't we all agree to talk like the grown ups?
May 11, 2006 2:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have a suggestion for you - parse out the lovely phrasing from artappraiser's posts and pay attention to what he's actually saying and how he's making his transitions.
And then try to figure out how that differs from my characterization, and explain that to me, if I am wrong.
I would be delighted to be shown how I am misinterpreting the guy, but what I am seeing is a huge waft of Cohen-like sneering at the hoi polloi who actually thought Colbert was funny, along with a side dish of imaginary victim BS.
The Le Bon stuff is absolute garbage. I have read Le Bon and he talks about essentially what are fascist movements, it's absolutely warped and demented to find in the response to Bushism the nearest parallel to that material today. In fact, frankly I cannot believe that a person can in good faith come to the conclusions artappraiser has stated here today, it absolutely does not square with any kind of legitimate interpretation of LeBon and the situation today in America.
So pardon my anger at being confronted with yet another calming voice laden with pedantry telling those who oppose Bush to lay down for the knife. Frankly I think those people are more dangerous at this point than the dead enders who still support Bush.
Quality discussion is not people who misuse their education, twittering like songbirds about things that have no connection to reality while the city burns. Civility to such people is a weapon to use to defuse the rightful anger of people who see wrongdoing.
May 11, 2006 2:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Now that's a line!! And "Bush's pearl clutching defenders" is a priceless picture.
Now back to the actual discussion...
[edit to be sure that I am not part of a smackdowns]
May 11, 2006 2:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry, but if you have to explain the joke, it's not funny. That's part of Comedy 101.
May 11, 2006 2:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're right, it IS a great turn of phrase. Would make a great political cartoon, I can visualize it. Oscar Wilde worthy.
Unfortunately, the way I still visualize Colbert's audience is snoring. Just mho, once again. I do realize senses of humor differ, and there is no "right" and "wrong" with that, but silly me, I thought the idea was for political comics was to work on capturing the audience to which they are speaking.
May 11, 2006 2:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
I get a lot of the criticism of Colbert. It was a bit uncomfortable with him verbally evicerating the President repeatedly, with him sitting 20 feet away and supposed to laugh at it. That's not because he's the President, but because he's (hard as it is to believe) a human being, and that can be hard to watch. I get why people say it was too long, too harsh, and too over the top.
What I don't get is how people can say it wasn't funny. It was one of those things you almost wish wasn't funny, because between the tension with the proximity of the President and the humorlessness of the disasters he was lampooning, you didn't really want to laugh. But I, at least, couldn't control myself. I guffawed.
May 11, 2006 2:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
erm, the point made in my first comment is that I didn't like the idea of Bill O'Reilly rules rule for now and evermore.
So they did it first. So everyone else should continue doing it back? I am supposed to be happy about that possibility? A future of a bunch of crazed fighting Balkaninzed blogpublic mobs trying to one up the ugliness of the historic right wing machine? You're welcome to it, I won't be there.
Yglesias: first time you ask your readers to email someone about some outrage or another, I stop reading. :-) Oh, I will make an exception for your sports posts, cause this kind of stuff is what spectator sports is for.
May 11, 2006 2:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
We should award a Cafe Medal of Freedom for an:
-- Outstanding turn of phrase
-- Outstanding verbal cartoon.
Is George Tenet available to place the medal around the neck of recipients??
May 11, 2006 3:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
My view is this. Making up some numbers, the probability you laugh at Colbert, given you are feel the system needs to be reformed in some significant way, is about 70%. The probability you laugh at him, given that you are a Tool of the Man, part of the Establishment, etc. is about 30%. So we can use Bayes rule, based on what your prior beliefs about whether someone is a tool, to update your new beliefs about their attitudes. Now individual by individual, you can't make any hard conclusions. A liberal might watch Colbert and honestly not find him funny. Seeing Justice Scalia laugh does not convince me that he is a progressive. But taken in an aggregate, seeing the correspondents fail to laugh has provided some evidence that on average, the white house correspondants really are deferential to authority, establishment types.
And stuff like Cohen's piece just keep adding to the evidence.
May 11, 2006 3:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Going back to Colbergate and why we need serious journalism...
I believe journalism is the citizens' window into the governing process. When the process is broken we are dependent upon journalism to shine a spotlight on it. Some of us want to use that spotlight to create pressure to fix the broken process, policy making. Others want to use the spotlight as a weapon to win the political battle.
The focus on politics vs. policy is the subject of an article in Editor & Publisher by Bill Israel. As a former colleague of Karl Rove he uses Rove as a focal point. Israel ends up with Ron Suskind -- the Bush administration is politics with no policy. He says this is particulary bad for national security. I agree.
Speaking to journalists author Israel lays out the role of journalism:
As to why we’re in this mess, the author argues:
The author concludes:
May 11, 2006 3:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Unfortunately, the way I still visualize Colbert's audience is snoring.
Who was Colbert's intended audience though? I'll be the first to admit that I don't know -- it could have been the people present at the dinner or it could have been the folks watching CSPAN. The latter were, from all I've heard, far from snoring.
May 11, 2006 3:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ok, I don't know what reality you are discussing, some narrative of your imaginings, but it has nothing to do with me.
I don't see any connection between LeBon and Colbert's routine, none at all.
I brought up LeBon in the context of mass blog-generated hate email cited in Richard Cohen's "Digital Lynch Mob" column, that reading what he described reminded me of LeBon, and so have things like this post by Josh Marshall for which I am now providing a link, and so did actions by freepers in the past. And I will add a bit more--I spent a couple of years moderating a busy forum where I read every single post, and I was often reminded of mob mentality there, too. The politics of the site doesn't even matter. And one final point, if someone who writes approving of Al Gore one day and pans Colbert the next is an enemy of the left deserving of mass vicious attack, something irrational is going on.
But don't mind me, just carry on creating whatever strawman you wish, to discuss whatever you wish. I'm done. Would just ask other readers to read my posts and not only your interpretation of them.
P.S. Broccoli lovers unite! :-)
May 11, 2006 4:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh Al, he's not explaining it to the people who got it, but think it wasn't funny. He's only explaining the jokes to the people to stupid to understand them, like Cohen.
May 11, 2006 5:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
this is designed not to amuse, but to wound, to goad, to irritate. It is not comedy;
This implies a profoundly squalid and postmodern comception of what comedy is. 'Was Colbert funny?'is a bit of a fatuous question, because it misses the point. The short version is: a culture which isn't sure what to be serious about also isn't sure what to laugh about - it's both or neither. Exhibit A: the harmlessly transgressive satire of 'Team America: World Police'- funny, but ultimately cowardly and dumb. Matt and Trey are proud to claim that they make a joke of everything. If everything's a joke, nothing is.
(long version here
and here.)
May 11, 2006 5:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
(sorry to comment on my on comment, but..one more thing):
The obvious corollary to 'if everything's a joke, nothing is' is its reverse, 'if nothing's a joke, everything is': voila, Colbert. The spirit of comedy is not going to get snuffed out without a fight.
May 11, 2006 5:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yep. If you have to explain the jokes to them, they're not funny.
May 11, 2006 5:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Colbert's performance will be remembered because he was able to do in twenty minutes what noone else has been able to do, show George W. Bush a true picture of himself without getting thrown out of the meeting. I think Colbert understood he had the ability to pop the bubble and he used the opportunity, with courage and great skill, to deliver the shameful truth both to the President and to the media. Of course they didn't think it was funny, but Colbert understood what he was about that evening.
Two quotes by Mark Twain put Colbert's work in context:
"Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand."
"The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter."
Mark Twain
May 11, 2006 6:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sigh...
The MSM doesn't do "neutral" or "objective" - it does spin. It's an agent of the state and the ruling social elements. It's purpose is to confuse, to water down, to muddie the resulting waters, to keep the population in a constant state of fear, anxiety and confusion.
This has always been its role, since its inception.
Both Hitler and Aleister Crowley criticized the media in their respective countries for exactly that. I imagine many other examples of such criticism can be found.
It's a joke even to consider the MSM as a source of "news", let alone "facts" or "truth".
While any given reporter MIGHT be motivated to find facts and truth, the end result of their limitiations, editing, and the overall influence of the industry renders their hard work essentially meaningless.
The true journalists are overwhelmingly out-numbered by flacks with agendas and simple incompetents.
I remember watching Jane Pauley one day on a talk show explaining that she wasn't "just" a broadcast news person, she had done years working for New York newspapers. My reaction was: "And this establishes what? When most newspapers are just as lame at news reporting as the network news outfits?"
I remember thirty years I read an article by the late naturalist Ivan Sanderson where he dissected a simple news article of several paragraphs reporting on the discovery of some "sea monster" that had washed up somewhere (Ivan was into "cryptozoology".) He managed to find so many errors of fact relative to whales and such in three or four paragraphs that it was obvious there was no attempt by the reporter to get anything right and put anything into perspective.
The purported job of a journalist is to go out, gather ALL the facts AND the background, and organize it into a comprehensive and comprehensible whole for the reader.
When was the last time ANYBODY in journalism did that?
The funny thing is that the one guy I know of who did do that was John Keel - the guy who was the real-life subject of "The Mothman Prophecies" movie. He got interested in UFOs and actually went out and did an amazing amount of innovative research on the subject, and managed to single-handedly shake up (temporarily at least) the UFO groups who had long lapsed into the notion that it was all "aliens" and the like. His research practically destroyed the conventional explanations as well as the "alien" theories. Unfortunately he came to the conclusion that the phenomena was so complex and bizarre that no real explanation could be found - and if there was one, it would likely be incomprehensible to most people.
This is pretty much where we stand now with the whole of society and geopolitics.
As Woody Allen summed up the human condition in five words, "Nothing works and nobody cares."
So now we're reduced to arguing for WEEKS whether some comedian was funny or insulting or sarcastic or whatever.
Meanwhile the US rushes to another disastrous war with Iran and the NSA is spying on every American.
What's wrong with this picture?
May 11, 2006 7:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think it's fairly obvious that Cohen "got" the joke - he simply didn't think it was funny because it offended his bias.
That's different from the joke actually not being funny because it made no sense or couldn't be related to anything anybody knows about.
Jokes have to either be completely nuts or be relatable to something people understand but turned on its head.
Jokes also don't have to be side-splitting hilarious to be jokes. If SOMEBODY laughs, it's a joke. If NOBODY laughs, it's not.
May 11, 2006 7:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
artappraiser-
your cite of LeBon in connection with angry emails directed at Cohen is what I was commenting on. That's an extremely strained interpretation of what Lebon had to say, especially in these times in which irrational groupthink has played such a critical role in the disastrous politics and policy of the last few years. So much so that I really think that either you just don't really get Lebon or aren't speaking in good faith.
Cohen was being a worthless drip in defending his idiotic column by citing rude, negative mails he received as if it somehow validated him as a thinker or commentator. This is the kind of specious chicanery gasbags like Cohen and yourself engage in in the place of having actual things to say that relate to reality.
Sorry if that was unclear.
I think rolling your eyes and accusing me of living in an alternate reality is a pretty piss poor way to engage this point, but I understand why you would be limited to that kind of defense of your lame, unbalanced characterization of today's politics in the context of Lebon's thinking.
May 11, 2006 7:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Because, let's be clear here. Lebon's work isn't just some neutrally charged academic work. It's the seminal work in studying the negative group psychology that supports fascist politics. So basically by citing his work you are calling the critics of Cohen proto-fascists, which is an obscene mischaracterization of today's politics.
May 11, 2006 7:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, but an Oscar Wilde he is. There were many, many people who didn't find Wilde funny either.
Say what you want about whether the routine was funny. But it wasn't easy or obvious. Colbert was hanging it out over the edge, like Sarah Schulman or Andy Kaufman, pushing the comedy into unknown terrain where you don't know until you get the audience reaction whether it's funny or not - but you do know you're going to get a rise out of 'em. Check "The Aristocrats". Also, try re-watching the Colbert routine. I found that on second viewing, some of my initial discomfort had evaporated, and I found it funnier than the first time. You may find the opposite, maybe it gets stale, but I think Colbert is doing something very, very novel in his ironic impersonation of a media figure with real bite, and it's inevitable that sometimes that act is going to blow up in your face in terms of audience reaction.
Or try watching some of his "Better Know a District" interviews. The dynamic is very much the same as with the Bush routine; you experience the same discomfort at his character's obnoxiousness. But because it's just some congressperson, and because of the captive in-studio audience's laughs, you suppress your anxiety and decide it's "funny". With the President, it just hung there, and people didn't know WHAT to make of it. Again, I cite Kaufman.
"When God ariseth, and when he visiteth, what shall we answer!" - Rev. Benjamin Hancock
May 11, 2006 7:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
So long as journalism requires adjectives, "objectivity" is no more an ideal than a 6,000 year old Earth. Sure, it may be the jenga piece that holds your mental universe together, but eventually reality's liberal bias takes a crowbar to your kneecaps.
Journalism was a nobler pursuit when people didn't pretend that anyone could - let alone should - provide the news without bias.
May 11, 2006 7:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
The purported job of a journalist is to go out, gather ALL the facts AND the background, and organize it into a comprehensive and comprehensible whole for the reader. When was the last time ANYBODY in journalism did that?
South Korea to Indict Stem Cell Researcher Hwang for Fraud
Oil Companies Not Entitled to Payment, Bolivian SaysFlu Shot Priorities Questioned
And the list goes on. Guess what, Trans? The world is - gasp - complicated; the mainstream media has no single "purpose", and most of what it does is both highly moral and highly professional. How about this thesis, for comparison: "The purpose of the blogosphere is to ensnare otherwise politically active citizens in pointless and never-ending online disputes, subverting their will to take political action. This is why the government allowed bloggers to maintain their exception to regulation of political advertising regulation: it uses the blogosphere as a steam valve to prevent citizens from engaging in real political activity, thus protecting its own power." Gosh, it makes sense, doesn't it? Except it's a total lie.
"When God ariseth, and when he visiteth, what shall we answer!" - Rev. Benjamin Hancock
May 11, 2006 7:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm going to take an ironic page out of the conservative-pundit playbook: people like you ought to move to France. :) The media there are not objective, and don't really pretend to be. And guess what? You'll probably think they suck just as bad as ours do.
"When God ariseth, and when he visiteth, what shall we answer!" - Rev. Benjamin Hancock
May 11, 2006 8:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
By the way, did anyone outside of North Carolina give a good god damn about the Duke rape case? Can anyone question that our niave belief in media neutrality gave us Bermuda, Monicagate, Duke, Joey Butafuco, and...well, OJ was pretty fun actually, and at least the LAPD was forced to open the rule book a time or two before framing another black guy.
But overall,the content of modern newprogramming is supply-side economic's greatest success story to date. If you yell it, they will come.
May 11, 2006 8:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
I liked France in 2003 - somebody had to stand up and say that Bush was just a mediocre rich-kid who played a cowboy on TV - but the wage riots were the nail in that country's world power status.
The 1998 riot at Penn State was more soundly justified, and far as I could tell they just wanted to see some tits.
May 11, 2006 8:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is no narrative which does not have a valid context for its expression. Apparently Art does not share this view. So, for example no scream of the mob, no matter how heartfelt and under what circumstances is to be given any press. I disagree, plebean that I am.
May 11, 2006 8:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
The examples you cite have nothing to do with the state.
The purpose of the MSM is to support the state and its social support mechanisms.
It doesn't even require the conscious support of this model by every member of it.
It's like the concentration camps in WWII - some guards went out of their way to make the prisoners plight less so, some went out their way to make it worse, and some, probably most, just did their jobs and followed orders.
It was the SYSTEM that produced the results. The same is true of the MSM.
And I'm not sure your hypothetical representation of blogs IS a total lie.
I see a lot of that "pointless" stuff on this blog. In fact, quite a few pundits and posters here seem to be devoted to "calming people down" over each political disaster as it happens. Daalder in particular seems to be devoted to that meme.
Let's all sit back and be calm while Rome burns appears to be the meme here, if anything. Let's analyze it to death - our death.
Now, from my Transhumanist perspective, I can go along with that, since I really don't give a damn how many chimps get killed as long as I don't need them, and technology keeps marching on. But from a correctness standpoint, I "have to" complain.
May 11, 2006 8:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sure we cared. Rich white frat boy varsity athletes rape black college-student/stripper? There's a whole lot going on in there to feed a nation's subliminal anxieties and fantasies.
"When God ariseth, and when he visiteth, what shall we answer!" - Rev. Benjamin Hancock
May 11, 2006 8:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
artappraiser, I am getting tired of your line and disagree with it profoundly. I responded to you previously on another thread about this and you did not bother commenting.
Your notion that only crazy left bloggers found Colbert funny is just plain wrong. As I said earlier, I've shown that video to non-bloggers who are pretty centrist Democrats and to a person they not only loved it but have been quoting from it. Fine if you don't think it's funny, but I think your characterization of those who do feel it had great value is just flat out wrong and colored by your own biases.
As for Edward R Murrow, whom you so reverently extoll as an example of how the media should be -- please remember that in his time he was castigated for "editorializing" and not reporting the news as he should -- and got in quite a bit of trouble with his employers over the whole McCarthy story.
My view of your entire argument against Colbert, the media and the blogs is that you are no more objective than the bloggers whom you try to discredit as not useful to the Democratic Party in retaking the Congress and Senate in 2006.
May 11, 2006 9:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
True enough, but why did the story have the legs that it did? Natalie Holloway was a story at first too, but somehow morphed into a mini-series. Who decides, and why?
May 11, 2006 9:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
You have blown this horn too often, artappraiser, with no proof whatsoever of your accusations. You are a blogger -- you sure post here often enough! Your intentions are no different than any other bloggers -- to get your arguments and opinions across and perhaps convince people of same. What examples can you cite to show that a blog such as Daily Kos is composed in the majority of a bunch of group-think and shrill members of a mob?
Kos gets hundreds of thousands of hits a day. Back up your claim or stop making it.
May 11, 2006 10:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
The guys paying the bills at the MSM,i.e., the publishers who tell the editors what to push.
You think Murdoch just sits back and counts his money?
Or the guy who runs the NYT?
These people already have money. What they're interested in is power. So they push agendas through their media.
Sometimes that agenda is more money - rape sells papers. Missing white girls in black countries sells papers because it implies rape. Rap artists who shoot each other sells papers because it confirms every white's prejudices about blacks (some of which happens to be reality in the ghetto) and thus keeps down the "riff-raff" and supports the "law enforcement society."
Sometimes it's WMDs and war - partly because war sells papers and partly because their agenda is to support the people in power, so THEY can hopefully get some more power. Plus it supports the "national security state".
If you mean why any particular story versus any other particular equivalent story that popped up that day or whenever, well, it's probably a simple matter of judgement as to which one seems to have more legs - and in some cases might just be random based on who in the industry started emphasizing the story first.
By the way, I understand there are Web sites and organizations that post UPCOMING important news articles days before they hit the media. Might be instructive to follow them.
May 11, 2006 10:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Colbert is supposed to be in character as a defender of the administration
I'm convinced this is the key, the critical detail that completely escapes the notice of Richard Cohen and other right wingers who claim to know that Colbert was "not funny".
They have never watched Colbert's show. People like Cohen simply don't realize that his on-screen persona is a parody of them.
How many of us would find a parody of ourselves amusing, if we had no clue that was what everyone else was sniggering about?
It's similar to the masterful interviews that Colbert and Samantha Bee used to do on the Daily Show, in persona, oozing sincerity with their fake questions, as they draw their subject in to bring out their nuttery. Those people never saw it coming.
Simply brilliant.
May 11, 2006 11:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Large numbers of your fellow Americans decide. The cable news networks are no different than any other business. When they see that a certain product is moving, they make more of it and push it. Many millions of Americans prefer coverage of sex crimes, child abductions, polygamists, wife murderers and celebrity missteps to coverage of nuclear proliferation, trade imbalances and international affairs. And when they do develop an interest in a foreign affairs topic, they want their coverage hot, patriotic, xenophobic and moral uncomplicated.
It's no conspiracy. Its just capitalism doing its thing: identifying desire and fulfilling it.
May 12, 2006 4:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Certain stories get killed while others get pushed, and the dynamic doesn't amount to good old supply and demand until after all the entrees reach the buffet table.
May 12, 2006 6:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
I do wish it was funny. I appreciated the schtic, and I enjoyed it in a bitter way, but I didn't laugh much. I think it was a lot of good things - bold, honest, courageous, needed. I just didn't think that funny was one (well, some parts were funny, but overall, I thought it was not exactly sidesplitting).
May 12, 2006 6:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
I do wish it was funny. I appreciated the schtic, and I enjoyed it in a bitter way, but I didn't laugh much. I think it was a lot of good things - bold, honest, courageous, needed. I just didn't think that funny was one (well, some parts were funny, but overall, I thought it was not exactly sidesplitting).
May 12, 2006 6:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
If you do not think that is funny, you are objectively anti-humor.
May 12, 2006 6:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah; but where's the rim shot, the Bada-Bing, Bada-Boom?
May 12, 2006 6:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, that is written in an insulting manner, and I don't share that aspect of the post, but I agree with the meaning.
You speak of a small minority of people who are on the fringes of any political group, right or left. To use examples like this to smear anyone who rightfully emails a reporter and calls them on inaccuracies is, I believe, unfair and inaccurate. Second, you have no idea how many emails Cohen received nor how many of them were truly off the wall rather than merely disagreeing with him -- yet you are perfectly willing to take his word for that.
Something similar happened when Deborah Howell, the ombudsman for The Washington Post tried to claim that the Abramoff scandal included Democrats as well as Republicans. There was what you would call a very "nasty" blogswarm of emails to her --the Post ended up shutting down the email site, claiming the majority of posts were "obscene."
Unfortunately for the Post, Daily Kos readers had saved the cache of emails before it was shut down and republished them. There were a lot of angry emails and even sarcastic ones. But very few that could be called "obscene."
And the bottom line was that Howell finally admitted that she was wrong -- she was not gracious about it, but she did admit it. That would not have happened without an outpouring of objection to her false reporting.
Yet you are very willing to believe Cohen -- could that be because you agree with him?
As I said before, fine if you want to think Colbert was not funny. But you are comlaining that it's not right for people to be against you for feeling that way, at the same time smearing those who feel the opposite. Can't have it both ways, artappraiser.
May 12, 2006 7:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
While "funny" is very subjective, "rude" and "bully" are less so.
Colbert was not ingratiating, or even polite, but "rude"? Telling people tha they are wrong is not rude, it is frank, provided some MINIMAL forms are observed, like no invectives, ephitets etc.
Then comes the "bully". Reducing a 12 year old girl to tears, or scolding an underling in front of his peers can be bullying. Bullying is picking upon the weak, not discomforting the powerful and comfortable.
In any case, using historical standards, court jesters could be more rude and bullying than Colbert; kings were raised to have less fragile egoes. (egos?)
May 12, 2006 9:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Doesn't the simple facts that so many people like Cohen felt the need to write columns saying "Colbert wasn't funny" and that people are still discussing him prove that he was a success?
May 12, 2006 10:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
It is funny - but part of the reason we are having this befuddled conversation is that some of us are befuddled at how much this performance didn't live up to what we expected given how funny Colbert is.
I'm in the un-funny crowd, but in the end, I think that the performance wouldn't have had any of the other many virtues it did have if it had also been funnier.
May 12, 2006 1:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
However, it would be hoped that there would a greater sense of goodwill less questioning of motives . . .
This is unfortunately absurd. The fact is that, regarding any public pronouncement by anyone in the political sphere in America today, the first question to be asked is, "What is the political motive for this statement?" If you're not asking that question, then you're being led around by the nose with your eyeballs up your ass.
May 12, 2006 4:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sure, let's all stop talking about the past. That's the ticket. What's the past got to say to us, after all? History is bunk, right?
May 12, 2006 4:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree. Rude would be pointing out that Bush's wife grins like a demented clown. That he himself looks like a decorticated chimpanzee. That his daughters defy parody. See the difference?
May 12, 2006 5:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, I'm not going to put words into Art's mouth, but I suspect that the motives of most of us here are rather understated, and maybe the simple fact that we don't get hundreds of thousands of hits a day is why Art blogs about the dangers of blogs at sites like this.
For my part, I figure that my participation at the cafe isn't especially about getting anything across in any big way - I think of it as a conversation with the two of you and ten or twelve other people whose eyes and opinions I can rely on to inform and bolster my own. One might - I won't, but one might - argue that the small-scale thing is very different than the large scale thing, and that in a site that is getting hundreds of thousands of hits, changes the character of the enterprise, from essentially sitting around talking to broadcasting. And that participation in a broadcast blog is going to tend to both up the emotional ante and also lead to a higher level of group think. Now that I'm trying it out, I can't quite figure out the reason why I thought that was a possibility, so I'll leave it hanging (and hope that I'm clear).
But I do think that there is a difference between thinking that you're talking in a strange fashion to a small group and thinking you're putting something out there in a bigger way.
May 12, 2006 5:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don't you ever like to think about and question the social groups and institutions you participate in? That's all I am doing. Throwing thoughts out there and seeing if anyone's thinking the same. BTW, I happen to like to read Yglesias because I see in many of his posts the same kind of approach. He doesn't use blogging to screech agitprop and blast foes, he just throws thoughts out there.
Sometimes it seems that people who have a preference in using blogs to communicate their immediate political feelings about news (something I feel no need to do) see in my more analytical type of commenting some kind of nefarious plot because I don't come out and scream "this is my opinion what should be done!!" That I'm trying to influence people or something. I'm not. I'm sharing my thoughts and hope to get input in return, to shape my own, I repeat: in order to shape my own thoughts. I like to be challenged with different perspectives on things I am thinking about, it helps me formulate things. Very rarely am I trying to convince anyone else. Matter of fact, I don't usually care what others' straight out opinion is and I don't see why they should care what mine is.
Haven't you ever been in a good college class or similar where people share their ideas and interpretations of things? Does everything on blogs have to be everyone's personal agitprop?
Really, nightprowlkitty, I don't understand your anger at me, it seems to be predicated by something that you think is there that is not. Believe me, I have noticed your consistent low rating of my comments, over a very long time, almost like a vendetta. Basically I've ignored it; I don't reciprocate. But now that you've decided to speak, I must say it seems like you have some kind of grudge or something, the ratings seem quite irrational at times. Certainly I get absolutely nothing out of them, don't learn a damn thing about what I supposedly did wrong according to you. I don't really care, but I think it's very strange, I think you are too suspicious of people's motives. Why not just allow people to discuss things? It's not like I haven't shone a willingness to help this site, spent a lot of time helping other members, posting in the Management section, and to help with making high level civil discussion here, it's not like I'm some kind of agent provocateur trying to wreck TPMCafe.
Are you the bloggers association P.R. agent or something? Why are you so angry at me for what you appear to think is my slandering of blogs? It's like you're personally offended, like you own all the blogs and I have offended your product. Sheesh you sound like the flip side of Mike McCurry.
I am interested in Blogs as a historical and cultural phenomenon, get it? I see good things and bad things about them, get it? I have spent a lot of time on them and want to share my thoughts about them, so that my time is not wasted, so that I learn something from having spent so much time, get it? I have made some conclusions, but not many, and want to discuss it with people with like interests, perhaps even in a scholarly manner, get it?
I'm not sorry I'm not enough of a black and white type person for you. I am very proud of being a "shades of grey" person. Keep on downrating me for my greyness, I don't really care, it only warns me not to expect much thoughtful discussion from user "nightprowlkitty."
Josh Marshall: "readers should never down-rate comments simply because they disagree with the views expressed."
May 12, 2006 7:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
p.s. This post is the one that made me a regular trusting reader of Talking Points Memo:
and I was intially attracted to Talking Points Memo Cafe because it seemed that there were a lot of people gathering here that wanted to create an alternative to a Daily Kos type forum, with a more sophisticated level of more thoughtful discussion and less inflammatory political rhetoric and agitprop.
I'm not ashamed to admit either of those things.
If you can't abide theoretical discussions and criticisms about blogging, then maybe you should skip over those parts?
May 12, 2006 7:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh nonsense. I have no problem with your stance on blogs, you are entitled to think and state whatever you feel about them. What I do take issue with are your conclusions which are not backed up with facts.
I can abide just about anything, artappraiser, except dishonesty.
May 12, 2006 7:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Devon, I am a big fan of TPM Cafe as well as Talking Points Memo. I agree with you that it is an entirely different kind of community than, say, Daily Kos. It's purpose and aim is different and I think it adds greatly to the public discourse on important topics.
My only problem is when blogs such as Daily Kos (and many others) are judged by standards that do not apply to them, precisely because there are so many more participants. TPM Cafe is great for reasoned discussion of issues, but not so great when it comes to nuts and bolts of politics. Daily Kos is great when it comes to, for example, finding out who's running in which local races, what people can do if they want to contribute to certain issues (i.e., calling Congressmen, donating to campaigns, etc.), and keeping abreast of what the traditional media is doing (much in the same way as the Muckraker site here keeps abreast of corruption in Congress).
In my opinion there shouldn't be any real conflict between the two -- they serve different, equally valuable purposes and both should be treated with respect.
May 12, 2006 7:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
First, I find it unbelievable that you are accusing me of "consistently" downrating you, artappraiser. It has only been on this thread that I have rated you at all. I found the "2" rating appropriate as I certainly didn't think what you were saying was "good" and that was the only other rating available to me to express my opinion of your posts. If there was unfairness it would be in rating you a 1 or a 0. It's amazing that you would make such an accusation when it is so easily proven false.
You have consistently criticized blogs (mainly ones such as Daily Kos) as "echo chambers," the users as falling for "group think," questioned what happens when bloggers disagree with the mainstream of opinion, insinuating that somehow they are "shunned" if they dare to break out of the groupthink. It has only been on the Colbert diaries, two of them, that I have plainly disagreed with you or, as you say, "challenged you with a different perspective," and it is only on this particular diary that I have rated you at all. I hold neither a grudge towards you nor a vendetta against you.
I have no problem with analytical thinking -- if I did I wouldn't visit the blogs. But your analysis of those to the left of you is not backed up by a shred of evidence, it is condescending, uses condescending words, and I disagree with it. So I am challenging you to back up your "analysis" with some real facts.
I think it is disingenous for you to claim that you are not trying to convince anyone of anything -- why bother putting an opinion out on a blog then? Plenty of people read TPM Cafe -- maybe not hundreds of thousands, but certainly thousands do.
You have also posted on this blog several times calling out posters who, in your opinion, are downrating wrongly, you post their names and make it very clear that you are trying to persuade others of your conclusions. Clearly this is a prime example of someone saying "this is my opinion what should be done!" To claim that you are merely stating your cool and considered analysis and are somehow different than the more "hot-headed" bloggers you find so distasteful is, I believe, also disingenuous. And I have no problem with your doing so and have never downrated you for it -- but please, don't claim that you are any different in wanting to persuade than any other blogger.
I've used no inflammatory language against you, artappraiser, nothing whatsoever about you personally but only against your "opinions." You, on the other hand, have accused me of grudges and of consistently downrating you, which is a flat out lie. I am very disappointed that you would make such an unfounded accusation and choose not to discuss the substance of my argument against what you have posted here on the topic.
May 12, 2006 8:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
P.S. I rated that comment with a 1, which I believe is generous, as you are accusing me of something I have not done -- a very cheap shot. That is not a matter of "shades of gray," artappraiser, it's just plain the wrong thing to do.
May 12, 2006 9:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't really see the dishonesty. Art has a fairly consitent set of concerns about blogs, and I don't see anything disingenuous or hypocritical about raising them as part of her blogging life. Inasmuch as this is an emerging media, and it's not yet clear what it will become, I think that skeptical voices are especially valuable in building a good informational/activist infrastructure to the blogosphere.
May 13, 2006 5:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Devon, the dishonesty I was referring to was Art's outrageous accusation that I have been holding a grudge and vendetta against her for a very long time and consistently downgrading her. That is just a lie, which can be easily checked by looking at the comment ratings. For someone who is so proud of her cool analysis, I think that was a very cheap shot and entirely unwarranted.
Yes, Art has consistently bashed the left blogs (I use Daily Kos only as an example). When she does this she leaves herself open to challenge as to her own analysis. She uses words such as "agitprop," "shrill" and "groupthink" without backing up any of these judgments and I called her on that.
I agree that blogs are an emerging media and I have no problem with skeptical voices and criticism of them. But "agitprop?" That assumes lies (propaganda) meant to agitate the unassuming reader in a way which is clearly undesirable. Could it possibly be that what is being posted at these blogs is the truth in the form of activism and not "agitprop"? If so, then Art is wrong, isn't she, and her use of that description is wrong as well. I think this is a valid challenge to her criticism.
Art did not in any way answer the substance of my disagreement with her. Instead she resorted to personal smears, outright lies and aspersions on my character. Given this, I find it impossible to respect her position.
Again, I agree that skeptical voices are valuable in building a good infrastructure in the blogosphere. But if you are going to make a charge, you should be able to back it up. Art didn't. The hypocrisy and disingenuousness I pointed out is amply evidenced in her own reply to me -- shrill denunciation of my character rather than a response to my examples and arguments.
May 13, 2006 11:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
P.S. I noticed, Devon, that you uprated Art with a 4 for her comment. Do you really think it was appropriate for her to lie about my ratings of her? Did you bother to check first to see if what she was saying was true? Is not that a form of agitprop, smearing someone else to prove a point? Hmmm.
May 13, 2006 11:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
I uprated because I thought the 1 was unfair. Maybe I'm wrong about the veracity of her claim - and maybe I should just stay out of it. In any case, not knowing which of you is correct on the ratings thing, and not seeing that especially as the point (I guess since I was standing on the sidelines), it seemed like an unfair response to the content as I understood it. In any case, I'll stay out of it.
May 13, 2006 6:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's easy to prove the veracity of her claim -- just click on her name and look at her comment ratings - you'll see for yourself. I think being falsely accused is grounds for rating a 1 -- quite frankly I thought it was generous.
But it's of course not your problem and I know your motives are good. Just another flame scene -- the pitfall of blogging.
May 13, 2006 7:47 PM | Reply | Permalink