I Cogitate
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Stephen Colbert through the eyes of Doug Elfman
Stephen Colbert lampooning President Bush at the recent White House Correspondents Dinner is no longer news. But the demarcation of the reactions to the event between so many of those in the New York/DC media 'bubble' and those outside the Beltway remains remarkable.
Doug Elfman, the enjoyably irreverent rascal who covers television for the Chicago Sun Times, nails it with his take. This is someone who actually gets it! Not just getting Colbert but the the entire Bush manifesto. Someone in what must be considered mainstream media.
May he soon become a White House correspondent himself--hell, it would be worth it even if I had to help him move his belongings from ChiTown to DC. But my sense is Elfman would have no part of such a migration--remember the old Groucho Marx joke about refusing to become a member of any 'club' that would have him.
Did media miss real Colbert story?top
BY DOUG ELFMAN Television Critic
Chicago Sun Times
May 7, 2006
A "blogstorm" is thundering across liberal Web sites. Many liberals are furious at the White House press corps for virtually ignoring Stephen Colbert's keynote speech at the press corp's own White House Correspondents' Dinner last Saturday. To non-liberals, this may seem like an isolated complaint. To liberals, it further justifies their belief that the media, particularly TV news, is a big stinking cabal of conservatives.
The truth is many in the media wrote about Bush's stand-up routine at the dinner as if they had just watched the coming of a comic genius, but they didn't report much on Colbert's funnier, harsher jokes. This may have been a case of the press corps following a standard motto: to the winner goes the spoils, and Bush got more laughs (out of copy written for him) than Colbert did.
How did Bush tickle reporters? He made fun of the fact that he can barely speak English (he is quite simply the worst communicator of all U.S. presidents), that our vice president is a heartless face-shooter, and that Bush is basically an idiot.
Ha ha, our "war president" knows he's a village idiot? To members of the White House press corps, that's some real funny stuff. To non-insiders, this looked like another example of good old boys and gals slapping each other on the back...
...But ignoring a newsworthy keynote speech -- at an event the press corps itself set up -- doesn't go unnoticed anymore. Internet stables for liberals, like the behemoth dailykos.com, began rumbling as soon as the correspondents' dinner was reported in the mainstream press, with scant word of Colbert's combustive address.
This is trouble for the media. It has been losing customers to bloggers and Web sites for years. This won't help. The media's implosion of silence could be one of the final reasons many liberals use to not turn on TV news. It's not like they feel a vested interest in the industry anyway, since it has been bought and parceled by conservatives.
There is Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, that Pravda of GOP propaganda and breeding ground for Bush appointees. There are the networks' Sunday news shows that give more face time to Republicans. There are cable news channels like MSNBC, where Republicans have programmed the shows and hired on-air Republicans and conservatives-lite, from Tucker Carlson to Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews. Some TV watchdogs even chronicle these conservative media daily, backed up by transcripts and video clips from TV news shows, in the expansive Web site, MediaMatters.com.
To read the rest, go here.
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