fake news - without the “news”
by Stefan Koski
Published: January 10, 2008
They’ve been called America’s anchors; they’ve been called the biggest names in fake news. On Monday night, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert returned to the airwaves as hosts of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report respectively.
With one major caveat: they weren’t returning with their writers.
With the Writers Guild of America having been on strike for more than two months now, Comedy Central wasn’t able to reach an interim agreement with them in time for the two shows to return with their writers. They would have to do without.
Having earned a reputation as the bane of hypocritical politicians and doublespeak stump speeches, especially those of the current administration, a number of journalists and pundits have wondered aloud lately at what effect the writers’ strike would have on the political process. After all, a surprising number of Americans use the two shows as their sole sources of news.
The status quo will be happy to know that although the two shows are once again part of the late-night line-up, they have been politically neutered. Without writers in tow, Stewart and Colbert are about as critical of politicians as the Home and Gardening Channel.
In fact, what they’re doing now cannot even really be called “fake news.” Neither show said much of anything related to politics. Both briefly mentioned Mike Huckabee winning the Republican Iowa Primary, and Stewart featured a montage of Democratic presidential candidates asking for “change,” but then they moved on to other topics - namely, the strike that is crippling their ability to mock politics.
Stewart blindly felt his way through the show’s opening before bringing on his guest for the evening. Colbert fared better. Never losing his panache or failing to stay in character, he was able to garner laughs and applause as he flaunted his usual pseudo-conservative shtick through two interviews.
Politics and the current state of political affairs, however, were largely left by the wayside.
The overall reaction of the press has been positive. For basic cable programming that normally stays out of the limelight, the return of the two shows has been overwhelmingly covered by more than two dozen major media outlets. Most are praising Stewart and in particular Colbert for doing so well given the situation. At the opening of The Colbert Report, the studio audience gave Colbert such a lengthy standing ovation that Colbert was forced to go into the stands to start physically forcing audience members to sit down.
The satisfied reaction of fans and media to favored shows that have been non-existent for the last two months can be equated to a starving Ethiopian child’s reaction to food - which is to say, biased. For the first show everyone is happy just to have Stewart and Colbert back.
But their shows aren’t back. By their own admission, the shows Stewart and Colbert are doing now are not how they should be. Stewart commented that without his writers he wasn’t doing “The Daily Show,” he was doing “A Daily Show.” Colbert pronounced his show’s title as “The Colbert Report,” adding extra significance to the final syllables where the T’s are normally silent.
They managed to pull through by poking fun of themselves and their writer-less shows (Colbert’s “The Wřrd” segment was blank), but the novelty of such gags will only last them for so long. Politics is their bread and butter. Satire their alpha and omega. Without them, fake news is hardly worth the name.
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