-Mke Kennelly
Hey people. I’m back. And now I’m a regular contributor it’s called. I don’t really understand blogging, I just like ranting, so whatever. Anyways I’m psyched to be able to write things as often as I want. Especially since the four of us collectively haven’t really started churning out the posts on a regular basis. But who cares? My name’s in blue on the side over there and I’m home for spring break and I want to make this site more productive or something so let’s get cracking. Or not really let’s because that means let us and I’m not really sure what you’re contribution is. I guess you could post comments at the bottom, that’s contributing. But there should be a contraction for let me if there’s a contraction for let us (and for there is and there are). So let’me get cracking and then let’yu get cracking as well. Frell this expression, and this language.

Anyways, first off let me say how excited I am to be a regular whatsamahoosit. (Microsoft Word apparently doesn’t recognise whatsamahoosit in spellcheck, which is bullshit (it doesn’t recognise spell-check without a hyphen either (At least the Paperclip is dead))). I feel like when a favourite guest character on a TV show finally gets added to the main credits and then gets criminally underused during his first season as a regular character until he’s killed off because the writer’s can’t figure out what to do with him. Or her.

But I don’t want to die in some contrived poorly written episode, especially when the mortal danger I was in a week ago should’ve killed me and then I survived miraculously.

But I have to stop talking about TV, so I can talk about fake news. Or in specific, the pop culture behemoth that is the Stewart/Colbert power-hour of information that dominates Comedy Central from 11 to midnight four nights a week. Now in true Stephen Colbert fashion, I’ve decided to write this post or whatever it’s called from the gut, instead of doing research. Mostly cuz its spring break and I’m lazy.

Due to the awesomeness of Comedy Central’s servers and the fact that I don’t have a TV in my dorm, I’ve begun to watch old episodes of the Daily Show. And the difference in the type of commentary is astounding. Compared to recent years, the Daily Show of yore was funny because it was fake. It would take something that was actually happening in the news, and change the reality of the situation, through Stewart’s witty punch lines on the end of real news snippets (which demonstrates how The Daily Show grew out of SNL’s Weekend Update formula (one that has long since ceased to be topical (or funny))), or the feigned ineptitude of the “correspondents” in order to create humour. But today’s Daily Show seems to rely on altering the story, for the story is in and of itself absurd enough. Instead it points out how screwed up our culture is, because that’s funny enough. Additionally, segments now function on metaphor for our current global situation, that are far more insightful than Onion-esque poorly written satire pieces.

I feel it all came to a head during Stewart’s Crossfire appearance where he dubbed Tucker Carlson a dick in all televised media and told the cable news networks they are hurting America. But during that interview, Carlson and that Democrat guy that nobody knows anymore tried to seriously treat Stewart like a newsperson. They criticised him for not actually interviewing John Kerry when he was on Stewart’s program, and Stewart defended himself by stating that the lead in for The Daily Show is “puppets making crank phone calls.” Stewart said that he hoped that it was not his and Comedy Central’s responsibility to report the news, for if that were the case; we’d be in “bad shape” (I actually found a transcript of the episode, truthiness be damned).

But it as it turns out, that’s where we’re going. I just watched The Daily Show’s analysis of Barrack Obama’s recent speech about race. And, more specifically, their analysis of the cable news networks responses to the speech. The “pundits” or whatever the hell they call themselves now couldn’t possibly understand what Obama was trying to say. Obama tried to treat the American people like intelligent adults. And the people who are supposed to be experts on the political system criticised him for reading off a teleprompter and called him a racist and anti-Semite. Now I’m sure that someone on the three news networks said something intelligent about Obama’s speech and The Daily Show just showed me the worst bit from six-odd hours of coverage. But Stewart’s tongue and cheek treatment of the speech with banter with “Senior Black Correspondent” Larry Wilmore captured the spirit of Obama’s speech in five minutes. As Stewart implied on Crossfire four years ago, there should be a problem with that. But, right now it seems to be the best we’ve got.

It took Stephen Colbert’s “balls-tastic” address to Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondent’s Dinner for someone to finally critique the president in a forum in which he was forced to listen. I remember the first time I saw that act and I felt bad for Colbert, because he was pushing ahead with what he’d written despite the fact that it seemed he was bombing badly. But then I realised he wasn’t performing for the audience in that room. He was performing for the one million people like me that we going to have watched it on youtube in the next twenty-four hours. The people who were sick of the 1984-esque fake criticism and fake praise that the media had been bestowing our government. It doesn’t matter what your opinion of any modern politician is. The modern media is doing them and us a disservice.

So when serious news becomes comedy and theatre, fake news must become serious. They have an audience that’s willing to listen. We’re not the stoned slackers that Bill O’Reilly and Geraldo Rivera have tried to marginalise us as. We’re Ivy League students and young entrepreneurs who have grown up in a society that has done us a disservice, and two stand up comics who made a living mocking the news of the nineties have become the only voices of reason left. And that’s the Word.