UPDATE: Media drone Richard Cohen proves my point -- see bottom of diary.
Stephen Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondents' Assocation dinner was probably the most blisteringly satirical attack ever directed against a sitting American president while he was in the same room.
But more significant than this historic event was the media's initial coverage of it -- virtually nonexistent -- just as in "The Emperor's New Clothes", the significant fact was not the monarch's nudity, but his subjects' complete denial of it.
Why did many media reports (like the
New York Times story by professional Bush bootlicker Elizabeth Bumiller) completely omit mention of the Colbert speech? Why did others make only passing mention of it, without noting its pointed barbs at Bush and the news media? Were the press terrified? Embarassed? Angry?
The explanation now being proffered by media people -- "Colbert just wasn't funny" -- is lame. But it has a certain truth to it: they didn't get his jokes, because, as Upton Sinclair once said, "It's impossible to make a man understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it." Why would they laugh at barbs that were directed almost as much at themselves as at Bush?
Colbert's routine may have had a few slow moments and a few less-than-sidesplitting lines, but millions of Americans outside of D.C. think it was both hilarious and scathing. It was also tremendously courageous -- and the press seem even more oblivious to that aspect of it than to its humor.
But I believe the chief reason they tossed Colbert's speech down the memory hole (until the online buzz forced them to backtrack) was that it violated decorum. Never mind that the WHCA should have known what they were getting when they hired Stephen Colbert. He's a sharp-tongued and mostly brilliant satirist, not a feel-good Leno-style lightweight.
He committed the sin of making people feel uncomfortable -- disrupting the cozy, chummy bonhomie of an event where, as Josh Orton puts it, "some of the most dangerous men in recent US history" swill cocktails and share chuckles with the press corps -- the same press corps that we Washington outsiders naively think are there to scrutinize, interrogate, and hold accountable those very officials.
Violating decorum -- killing the party buzz -- harshing everyone's mellow -- being uncool -- is a far, far greater crime in D.C., it seems, than lying the country into a war that has made us less safe, leaking classified information and destroying the careers of intelligence officials for political gain, and all the other outrages of the Bush regime that Colbert mocked.
No doubt the speech is uncomfortable to watch, even on video. In Chris Durang's words, "It's like Hamlet forcing King Claudius to watch the play that accuses him of murder. Or it's like a man asked to be Court Jester who shows up and tells the king exactly what's wrong with him, and gets out of the building before they can behead him."
But the press could still laugh at Colbert's wit, or at least appreciate its sharpness, even while cringing at the intensity of the attack. Of course, that would require putting some sense of journalistic perspective ahead of the importance of being part of the "in" crowd.
As for understanding why so many of the rest of us find Colbert not only funny and truthful, but also brave? That would appear to be completely beyond them.
UPDATE: Richard Cohen proves my point:
...Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush. ...
[Colbert] had a chance to tell the president and much of important (and self-important) Washington things it would have been good for them to hear. But he was, like much of the blogosphere itself, telling like-minded people what they already know and alienating all the others.
It's exactly as I said: Violating decorum is more important to these people than saying what needs to be said -- what hasn't been said to George W. Bush's face over the last five years.
If the things Colbert told Bush
weren't things that it was good for him to hear, what things does Cohen think Colbert
should have told him? What are we allowed to say to our poor, fragile, easily offended king that won't bruise his precious royal ego?
Colbert didn't alienate the vast numbers of Americans who love and admire what he did -- only a small handful of media elites, who mistake
themselves for "all the others."
Needless to say, self-loathing quasi-liberals like Richard Cohen
never apply this standard (of not saying anything that might alienate anyone) to right-wingers. O'Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc. apparently are allowed to offend and alienate people with impunity. But we mustn't offend or alienate the president, or his loyal retainers, the press!
What a shameful thing for an American so-called "journalist" to write.
More commentary at The Situation Room