Colbert defending

Further to my post on Colbert Bashing, I submit two more responses to that dreadful faux-liberal, Richard Cohen's attack on Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. In the same way that the MSM attacks the usurping bloggers, they attack Colbert (when they find that ignoring him didn't work) for doing what should have been their job -- for calling it like it is and speaking up publicly when it mattered. Unfortunately for those present, he embarrassed some powerful people who have not been doing their jobs well. Colbert spoke for the majority when he spoke truthiness to power and, whether you found it funny or not (and I did), it was thrilling to finally hear this stuff being talked about in a major forum with all the main players present. It was no less true for being funny and it was about time it was said! Thanks again Stephen!

Ezra Klein:

Worse than being rude, Colbert was substantive. He "took a swipe at Bush's Iraq policy, at domestic eavesdropping, and he took a shot at the news corps for purportedly being nothing more than stenographers recording what the Bush White House said." In other words, he urinated on Richard Cohen's fire hydrant, and Cohen's not happy about it.

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Colbert, on the other hand, is an embarrassment. He doesn't get that substantive criticisms of the president should only appear in easily ignored venues. The job of the pundit is not to speak truth to power for power's sake, but to speak about power to the public for appearance's sake. That's how we know we've a healthy democracy, when journalists with wide access and great sources can leak press releases to the public fully hours before the administration would've sent them out. If journalists were to start screaming at power, convincing power that there was no friendship, or at least affection, underlying the relationship, the gig would be up. And Colbert came dangerously close to doing exactly that.

He was speaking, after all, on behalf of the White House Correspondent's Association. He was their monkey, and so it was ultimately their fault that he was present to fling poo at the honoree. This dinner is about one thing: reifying that the press corps can separate the personal from the political. At the end of the day, everyone's in the same club. They are, if not friends, then colleagues. But Colbert spoiled that, and he spoiled it for Cohen, too. He signaled that there's a whole mass of people out there for whom politics doesn't stop at five o'clock, who think the president's actions are not confined to anyone's dayjob. Colbert represented them, and Cohen knows that he doesn't. And notice this: Cohen never attacked Colbert for getting it wrong, for missing the issues, for spinning the facts. He attacked Colbert's worth as a comedian, but he never broached his values as a commentator. Respect Cohen for his realism: that's one hydrant he's never getting back.

Robert Parry:

Yet, while Cohen may see himself defending decorum and civility, his column is another sign of what's terribly wrong with the U.S. news media: With few exceptions, the Washington press corps has failed to hold Bush and his top advisers accountable for their long record of deception and for actions that have violated U.S. constitutional principles and American moral standards.

Over the past several years, as Bush asserted unlimited presidential powers and implemented policies that have led the United States into the business of torture and an unprovoked war in Iraq, Washington journalists mostly stayed on the sidelines or actively assisted the administration, often wrapping its extraordinary actions in a cloak of normality designed more to calm than alert the public. At such a dangerous moment, when a government is committing crimes of state, politeness is not necessarily a virtue.

So, average Americans are growing more and more agitated because too often in the past five years they have watched the national press act more like courtiers to a monarch than an independent, aggressive Fourth Estate. This fawning style of the Washington media continued into the April 29 dinner.

Even as the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq passed 2,400 and the toll of Iraqi dead soared into the tens of thousands, the journalists seemed more interested in staying in Bush’s favor than in risking his displeasure.

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Colbert’s monologue also struck too close to home when he poked fun at the journalists for letting the country down by not asking the tough questions before the Iraq War.

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Even before the Colbert controversy, the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner and similar press-politician hobnobbing have been cringing examples of unethical journalistic behavior.

The American people count on the news media to act as their eyes and ears, as watchdogs on the government, not lap dogs wagging tails and licking the faces of administration officials. Whatever value these dinners might once have had – as an opportunity for reporters to get to know government sources in a more casual atmosphere – has long passed.

Since the mid-1980s, the dinners have become competitions among the news organizations to attract the biggest Hollywood celebrities or infamous characters from the latest national scandal. Combined with lavish parties sponsored by free-spending outlets like Vanity Fair or Bloomberg News, the dinners have become all about the buzz.

Plus, while these self-indulgent affairs might seem fairly harmless in normal political times, they are more objectionable when American troops are dying overseas and the Executive Branch is asserting its right to trample constitutional rights, including First Amendment protections for journalists.

This contradiction is especially striking as the news media fawns over Bush while he attacks any nascent signs of journalistic independence. The administration is currently looking into the possibility of jailing investigative reporters and their sources for revealing policies that the White House wanted to keep secret, such as warrantless wiretaps of Americans and clandestine overseas prisons where detainees are hidden and allegedly tortured.

The fact that so many national journalists see no problem cavorting with Bush and his inner circle at such a time explains why so many Americans have reached the conclusion that the nation needs a new news media, one that demonstrates a true commitment to the public’s right to know, rather than a desire for cozy relations with the insiders.

Indeed, in a world with a truly independent news media, it is hard to imagine there would ever be a White House Correspondents’ dinner.

In such a world, the Washington Post also might find better use for its treasured space on its Op-Ed page than giving it over to a columnist who favors decorum over accountability. The Post might even hire a columnist who would object less to a sharp-tongued comedian lampooning a politician and complain more about a President who disdains domestic and international law, who tolerates abusive treatment of prisoners, and who inflicts mayhem on a nation thousands of miles away that was not threatening the United States.

Only the likes of Richard Cohen could see George W. Bush as the victim and Stephen Colbert as the bully.