Stephen Colbert, author of I Am America (And So Can You!)
But the message I draw from Mr. Colbert is not that members of the media-political complex need to laugh at themselves, but that they need to take a hard look. The incipient generation of news consumers has made it clear that it does not want to see a bunch of guys with really nice neckware standing on the White House lawn talking about what they did not learn in the press room behind them and then flick at “sources” who suggest that “one thing is clear.”
One thing is, in fact, clear, from the plummeting numbers for network news: the jig is up. Consumers have decided that network news and talk shows are every bit as fake and not nearly as funny as “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.”
“Why shouldn’t a comedic fake newscaster feel right at home in a news format that itself verges on fakery?” said Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at George Washington University. “After all, these shows aren’t all that different from televised wrestling, with the shouts and grunts that simulate combat during what is really a fixed fight, followed by everyone involved in the charade going out for drinks afterward.”
You can read the full transcript and watch the video. Here’s just a highlight, as Colbert reveals the influence President Nixon had upon him.
MR. RUSSERT: Now, let me show you and our viewers what you said about that. And “Here’s something Colbertophiles might not know or might not want to know: He loves Richard Nixon. He has a 1972 Nixon campaign poster on the wall of his office. He points at it and says, ‘He was so liberal! Look at what he was running on. He started the EPA. He gave 18-year-olds the vote. His issues were education, drugs, women, minorities, youth involvement, ending the draft, and improving the environment. John Kerry couldn’t have run on this!” What I would give for a Nixon.
MR. COLBERT: It’d be great. It’d be great.
MR. RUSSERT: You, you love Richard Nixon.
MR. COLBERT: I have great warm feelings for Richard Nixon. He was the first president that I was aware of, and I was a little upset with him because, when I would come home in the afternoons from school, instead of “The Munsters” or “The Three Stooges” on TV, it was Senator Sam Urban. And while his eyebrows were hilarious, they weren’t quite as good as Herman Munster.
MR. RUSSERT: Would you be Nixonian in your approach to the presidency?
MR. COLBERT: I’d be Nixonish or Nixonoid. Is that like being Nixonian? Define Nixonian. Powerful?
