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Guy YedwabWriting the Essay4/10/2007Interpretation
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“Fact-Obsessed Bloggers” -- My initial, visceral reaction to
The Daily Show
's “Fact ObsessedBloggers” sketch was that it was hilarious to see what lengths of absurdity Stephen Colbertwould go to with a stone-serious face. Phrases which could in almost no context be considerednormal were rattled off with the same icy gravitas with which we expect Ted Koppel toannounce an attack on our nation, and the same righteous ire with which Bill O'Reilly treatsDemocrats on his show. The relationship between Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart in thissketch, however, comes to mirror the relationship between Stewart's style of 
The Daily Show
and Colbert's eventual use of 
The Colbert Report 
: as Colbert says, “Jon may point out thehypocrisy happening in the news story... I illustrate the hypocrisy in the news story [in mycharacter].” In this sketch, as Colbert goes through his increasingly absurd and hypocriticalinterpretation of the established media en masse, he provides a perfect foil to Stewart's genuinereactions to his work. As Anne Bogart would say, he uses the prompting of Jon Stewart'squestions to “light a fire” under the stereotype of traditional media's reactions to new media— Colbert begins with statements that seem rational and conform to the stereotypical logic of traditional media, Jon asks a pointed question which forces Colbert to respond in a way that betrays the gaping flaws in that logic. Un-pushed, Colbert would seem like a rational mediaanalyst—pushed by Jon, he manages to reveal more about the conventional wisdom than weoriginally knew.
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Truthiness – Originally, what I thought was amazing about this segment was the use of a verycommon stereotype (the journalist who ignores fact) to attack a cultural phenomenon (anerosion of the idea of absolute truth). Colbert identifies that journalists who don't believe inobjective fact get to use their subjective facts to build a reality of their own. He revisits this
 
theme many times, most notably in another segment titled “Wikiality,” where he says that Web2.0 has made reality so subjective that anyone can edit it (like a Wikipedia article). Thissegment, being the heart of the first episode, and being one of the most notorious of his sketches(the word “truthiness” was OED's Word of the Year in 2005), has always seemed to meimportant in the grand scheme of things—it established the central idea behind StephenColbert's character, and (through the stylistic format of The Word segment) linked it to the BillO'Reilly segments (Memo) which it parodies. Colbert himself referred to it as “the thesisstatement of the show,” and it reappears nearly verbatim partway into his speech at the PressCorrespondents' Dinner. Again, Colbert seems to set a fire underneath a common stereotype(that certain journalists don't seem to care about facts as much as their passions) to come upwith a more over-arching lesson. It is satirical not just toward a certain group of political people, but towards an entire philosophy of life. And unlike the Daily Show, he accomplishesthis without the aid of the probing questions of Jon Stewart—instead, like Bill O'Reilly's talking points projected during his “Memo” segment, he uses ironic bullet points at the side of thescreen, carefully worded to undercut and expand the meaning of what he is saying. I alwaysimagined that those words are based on the commentary that hits Stephen Colbert whenever hewatches those pundits he disagrees with—the analytical thoughts with which he lights a fireunder the thoughts of the narrow-minded.
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Press Correspondents' Dinner – If Truthiness is the thesis of Colbert's career, than the PressCorrespondents' Dinner is one of the peaks. Stephen Colbert delivers an unabashadly wickedskewering of the Bush Administration and the established press in the presence of the Presidentand addressed to the press itself. The message of the satire was clear, and it was clear that manywere uncomfortable with the subject. But nobody could argue with what Colbert was saying— merely by expressing their disapproval that he said it at a forum that most thought should have been devoid of political debate. For Stephen Colbert, as he describes it, he came to do exactlywhat he does on his show. His assumption was that he had been summoned to do just that. It
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