By Daniel Velarde
All it took to seduce America’s news anchors was a running gag and a plaster cast. That’s what Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert found out this summer when he hurt his wrist and started a satirical media campaign against “wrist violence.”
NBC’s Brian Williams and Tim Russert rushed to scribble their names on the comedian’s cast. Then-White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, formerly of Fox News, was next in line.
CBS’s Katie Couric even agreed to wear Colbert’s awareness bracelet to her newscast, before thinking better of it.
Oddly, Charles Gibson of ABC World News chose not to play the game. The New York Times gave us this clue: “Some media observers interpreted his recalcitrance as a statement that real news shows are not to be conflated with parodies.”
But the observers got it wrong. Gibson’s snub makes no difference. We have reached the stage where there is more credibility in a caricature of journalism than in the trade itself.
“The Colbert Report,” a fake news commentary, and its big brother “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart – a fake news anchor – has won out.
Take a look back at network ratings for the last U.S. presidential campaign. The Pew Research Center watched closely as “The Daily Show” trampled mainstream media in key areas. It turns out that none of America’s pious, puffed-up evening newscasters managed to attract as many male viewers as Stewart.
Who can doubt that Colbert’s ballooning popularity reflects a deep rejection of broadcasting’s drab, artificial ritual?
Watching news is essentially the same as idol worshipping. It means buying a symbol, not a reality, of the day’s events. It means believing in the incantations of a handsome face, alternately stern or soothing as circumstance demands, in the ash-coloured suit of the anchor or the khaki vest and dramatic pose of the field reporter, for whom all cities might well be Gaza or Fallujah.
Witness what broadcasting has become. Pretend anchors are more convincing, more real, than actual newscasters.
Every day, Jon Stewart puts on his tie to play a role in front of cameras. Couric, Williams, and Gibson do the same, three false idols masquerading as something they’re not.
The difference is this: Stewart does not pretend his act is reality. His insincerity is sincere. And so his relationship with his viewers is a genuine one, while theirs is confused, mystified, and abstracted.
Viewers flock to Stewart and Colbert because, as faux newscasters, they possess a fundamental honesty essential to any exchange of ideas.
The media observers were wrong because real news shows are not being conflated with parodies: they are the parodies.
Brian Williams exists as a reflection of Colbert and not the other way around. And so he craves Colbert the way the undead lust for blood, gulping down the comedian’s humanity to enliven a contrived, soulless onscreen persona.
Why else do newscasters show up to late night talk shows and swap facile stories with stand-up comics? Or fraternize with grinning politicians at press gallery dinners? The very politicians whom, in pretending to pursue the public interest, they are forced to criticize the next day?
Simple. News anchors have no shape or substance of their own, so they borrow those of others. Colbert dresses as a newsman only to feed the newsmen.
Why do we marvel at our vampiric news networks, at the battalions of sports and entertainment reporters who feast on the living flesh of athletes and film stars?
Through the debris, we trace this summer’s tragedy to its final act.
We watch the night’s broadcast and wonder what happened to inspired, passionate storytelling.
For the most part, it was so carefully weeded out of broadcasting’s factory-wrapped product that it echoes only in the jesters’ shrieks, at the far edge of television’s royal court.
“In the last time there shall be mockers,” but they might not be the ones you expect.