At the April 27 White House Correspondents' Association dinner, Stephen Colbert followed George Bush's humorous address to this press with a devastating satiric attack not just against Bush, but against the press corps that panders to him.
The embarrassed press corps, however, had the last word. And they buried it. Most of them who covered the dinnery glossed over Colbert's brutally truthful presentation, or simply didn't mention it at all.
Or did Colbert have the last word, tricking the press into acting out his point that if they don't print it, well, it couldn't have happened?
The way those of us outside the Beltway know it happened is that a few attendees wrote about it online. Here's the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin's excellent online story about what happened and his survey of the media's bizarre failure to report on it to the general public, along with links to independent bloggers who did write about it for the limited online audience. The reportage on the dinner runs 3 pages; be sure to click through.
Here's the video of Colbert (including his own vignette in which he plays the new White House press secretary relentlessly pursued by correspondent Helen Thomas asking "Why did we invade Iraq?"). It's the most brilliant performance I've seen since Colbert's colleague Jon Stewart destroyed Tucker Carlson on Crossfire. Colbert is a national treasure.
I always find it amazing that the mainstream media is constantly afraid to address issues and go digging out facts. Berstein has lost the investigative reporting for the Post and the Watergate story back then barely got out to the nation as a whole.
ReplyDeleteCobert is over the top (I like Stewart better). But, he's spot on.
Thanks for the comprehensive post.
Scot