"Comedians, Fools, and News Anchors"

On Wednesday the 10th of this month Norman Solomon wrote an article for Truthout.org entitled, “The Sickening Praise for The Daily Show.” In it he suggests that the media’s overwhelming praise for Jon Stewart’s “A Daily Show” might really be a tacit form of convoluted self-loathing. He points out that while most journalists consume themselves with examining the emperor’s embroidery Mr. Stewart blatantly goes after the big and relevant issues of the day, speaking naked truth to powers that would otherwise be clothed in lies.

In a nation where, in truth, mainstream media neither swings right nor left but rather has no substance at all, how does the Daily Show get away with reporting the real news?

Because it’s a comedy show!

In the past you could tell the horrid truth that everyone knew but no one wanted to utter, and if you did it with a “wink, wink, nudge, nudge, witty tongue-in-cheek,” you could become a famous playwright (Google "Shakespeare"). You could sing a little song, do a little dance, tell the truth and put seltzer down your pants. Why? Because comedy frequently provides a rather impervious armor for truth.

Consider the fools of the medieval court. They could hurl insults, laugh out loud at the preposterous, bring greed and ignorance into the light of day, poke fun at the nobility, break with convention, speak for the poor, and do a little tumbling all in a day’s work. All you had to do was claim to be stupid and wear a funny hat with bells.

Today you can still insult a president of the United States through an act of comedic mimicry and maybe even get a lucrative advertising contract (Google "Frank Caliendo"). And if you report the real news beneath a thin veil of joshin’ and jivin’ then you just might have the best comedy show of the season.

But addressing the important issues with straightforward and unbiased investigation on prime time; forget it! Only recently during the many-pronged bailout debacle has the news taken a breather to report a few facts about some really important issues. But for the most part I suspect that the media will soon slip back into its bog of pablum with barely an air bubble to show that it had surfaced.

Therefore, since we apparently have a postmodern mediascape where real news has been consigned to the dustbin, where conglomerates control the dispersal of public information and salivate at any opportunity to pull independent sources into the fold, where real journalists have been shackled to a news machine that serves up cold oatmeal with no milk or sugar, where the Fourth Estate is now a business unit that fills the airwaves with Lindsay and Michael and Brittney and Rush, perhaps the best we can do is to designate all news as comedy and insist that all news reporters wear a hat festooned with bells.

Maybe then we could get the real news.