Frank Rich talks about the news and Stephen Colbert

Two time guest of The Colbert Report Frank Rich was in Florida yesterday lamenting the state of the news, particularly the TV news, at an event for The Society of the Four Arts. Condemning what he called a triumph of “entertainment over reality”, The Palm Beach Daily News quotes Rich as saying: “We live in an age of what Stephen Colbert (host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report) calls truthiness . . . What used to be truth has been replaced by something that looks like reality, but is often fictionalized.”

This reminded me of Rich’s interesting New York Times OpEd piece from just before last November’s elections. The article has since been archived, but NFZ previously quoted it here. To refresh your memory, Rich noted:

The 2002 midterms were ridiculed as the “Seinfeld” election — about nothing — and 2006 often does seem like the “Colbert” election, so suffused is it with unreality, or what Mr. Colbert calls “truthiness.” Or perhaps the “Borat” election, after the character created by Mr. Colbert’s equally popular British counterpart, Sacha Baron Cohen, whose mockumentary about the American travels of a crude fictional TV reporter from Kazakhstan opened to great acclaim this weekend. Like both these comedians, our politicians and their media surrogates have been going to extremes this year to blur the difference between truth and truthiness, all the better to confuse the audience.

But there’s one important difference. When Mr. Colbert’s fake talking head provokes a real congressman into making a fool of himself or Mr. Baron Cohen’s fake reporter tries to storm the real White House’s gates, it’s a merry prank for our entertainment. By contrast, the clowns on the ballot busily falsifying reality are vying to be in charge of our real world at one of the most perilous times in our history.

This conclusion is hardly a revelation to his fans (although it is rather more elegantly stated than most of us might be capable of contriving), but it is gratifying to see members of the media continue to acknowledge that Stephen and TCR, in addition to making us laugh until our sides hurt night after night, are offering a brilliant and incisive critique of the more “popular” news outlets of the day.

I believe that it’s a measure of Stephen’s success as a satirical pundit that he counts so many mainstream media figures among his regular viewers. Today, it’s Frank Rich. Recently, Jill Abramson and Andrea Mitchell confessed to being regular watchers. And consider the roster of “old media” -type guests that Stephen has hosted: Tom Brokaw, Lesley Stahl, Stone Phillips, Cokie Roberts, David Gregory, Carl Bernstein, Jim Lehrer, Mike Wallace, Dan Rather and Christiane Amanpour, just to name a few. If success can be measured by earning the respect of one’s “peers,” then Maureen Dowd (also a former guest) was right when she called Stephen one of “America’s Anchors”.