NYT on Colbert
The New York Times ignored Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner—much to the consternation of all thinking people everywhere—but the NYT weighs in tomorrow on the uproar over Colbert’s performance and the uproar over the mainstream media’s efforts to diminish the importance of Colbert’s performance.
At issue was a heavily nuanced, often ironic performance by Mr. Colbert, who got in many licks at the president—on the invasion of Iraq, on the administration’s penchant for secrecy, on domestic eavesdropping—with lines that sounded supportive of Mr. Bush but were quickly revealed to be anything but….“Now I know there’s some polls out there saying this man has a 32-percent approval rating,” Mr. Colbert said a few moments later. “But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking ‘in reality.’ And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
That line got a relatively warm laugh, but many others were met with near silence. In one such instance, he criticized reporters for likening Mr. Bush’s recent staff changes to “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” “This administration is not sinking,” Mr. Colbert said; “this administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.”
The NYT goes on to justify their downplaying of Colbert by claiming that some folks didn’t find him funny. Yeah, no shit. I’m guessing George Bush and the folks from Fox News weren’t amused. What was newsworthy about Colbert’s performance wasn’t that it had everyone rolling in the aisles, but that Colbert managed to do in twenty minutes what the gathered members of the Washington press have seemed incapable of doing for the last six years: Colbert held Bush accountable. It was an audacious, breathtaking, gutsy performance—and it pissed of Bush and shocked the media establishment. And that’s what was newsworthy about it.
Yet more evidence of the NYT’s anti-Colbert bias for conspiracy theorists to chew on: the report, by Jacques Steinberg, mentionts the poll on Gawker that I linked to earlier today:
In an online survey begun yesterday, the snarky Web site Gawker sought to boil down the matter to its essence by asking readers to vote on whether they thought Mr. Colbert’s performance, broadcast live on C-Span and since then widely available on the Internet, was “one of the most patriotic acts I’ve witnessed of any individual” or “not really that funny.”
Steinberg doesn’t mention that “one of the most patriotic acts I’ve witnessed of any individual” won in a landslide: 85.5% to 14.5%.
I officially hate the New York Times.