Dear PE,

Sad to say, but its not hard to see why your paper wouldn't cover Stephen Colbert's stunning performance at the WH correspondents' diner. His biting remarks merely held our press and president to minimum standards of truth. But it is surprising that you instead publish E. Bumiller's transparently non-news story on the patently weak routine enacted by the president and his comedic stunt double. For you to propagate the resulting disinformation suggests that you have learned nothing from the Judy Miller debacle. This is a lie by omission and you know it. Please address this matter publicly or continue to lose credibility for the MSM.

Bill Schwarz

media matters

But in their subsequent coverage of the event, numerous news outlets focused only on Bush's light-hearted comedy, while omitting mention of Colbert's blistering performance. On the April 30 edition of ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopoulos played an excerpt of Bush's act and remarked that the dinner "gets more inventive every year." That same morning, on NBC's Sunday Today, co-host Lester Holt introduced clips of the Bush-Bridges routine by noting that the "relationship between the White House press corps and the president can be a contentious one, but last night it was all laughs." The footage of Bush's performance also aired on the April 30 broadcast of NBC's Nightly News.
On May 1, all three major networks played clips of Bush's routine on their morning shows, but ignored Colbert entirely. CNN's American Morning did the same.

Similarly, a May 1 New York Times article on the event -- "A New Set of Bush Twins Appear at Annual Correspondents' Dinner"

saturday, sunday, monday, tuesday wednesday. 5 days. this is news? letters


- bill 5-03-2006 2:29 pm [add a comment]

5 days late and lots of quotes saying "the routine wasn't really that funny" so the Times would seem justified in not...even...mentioning it the first time around. You know, it's just those blogosphere crazies of the left and the right who got worked up and "debated" this. Also, this article is "neutral" on whether the Pres. was visibly angered by the routine (ie, raises it only to get a "no comment" from the White House) and doesn't mention that his aides left early or immediately after it was over and said it "crossed the line," as US News & World Report reported.

Also, no results on the Gawker poll. No stats on how much the files had been viewed/downloaded.
- tom moody 5-03-2006 3:17 pm [add a comment]

I mean, from reading this, you would never know that the clip was insanely popular, only that it was generating "controversy" after the fact. I hate the New Pravda.
- tom moody 5-03-2006 3:27 pm [add a comment]

talk about a doppelganger!!! i got your doppelganger!!! 1st the times (and the rest of msm) blows the coverage on bush co for 5 years. gets called on it. then blows the exposee when its tossed in the news/media industries lap. (every player was present) this is amazing. all set to the tune of nyt (and the rest of msm) whistling in the dark. dum de dum, what 500 lb gorilla? i dont see no gorilla. only bloggers can see the gorilla? ...letters. just amazing. i think this is a watershed event and i hope we do turn the corner with it. WE'LL TELL YOU WHAT THE FUCKING NEWS IS SO YOU BETTER START FUCKING COVERING IT!!!! this nyt piece today as tom points out is tepid pee pee. get back to work and bring us something real.
- bill 5-03-2006 4:59 pm [add a comment]

Right on. I like this letter, too:

So, the targets of the satire (Republicans and the Media Elite) were not amused. When they say it was "not funny", I'm sure for them, it was not.

For the REST of us (88%) however, it was freaking hilarious! My friends and I were smiling ear to ear and saying "ooooohh!!!" as he twisted the dagger into the entire room of pompous asses (except Fox News, of course)! To us, Colbert was VERY funny.

Colbert hit a homerun, in fact, he hit several! Dana Milbank, Matt Drudge and The MSM's effete columnists may not have laughed, but my friends and I did, and when we weren't laughing out loud, we were simply slack-jawed in amazement that Colbert went ALL THE WAY and did not hold back his character at all! KUDOS!

Funny!!?? I fucking wept.
- steve 5-03-2006 5:41 pm [add a comment]

now im going to have to explain why i think SC's approach is valid and Michael Moore isnt. ready?
- bill 5-03-2006 6:14 pm [add a comment]

You ought to see Fahrenheit 9/11 first. Great movie!
- tom moody 5-03-2006 9:21 pm [add a comment]

finally saw it on tv. thanks for not calling it a documentary.
- bill 5-03-2006 10:34 pm [add a comment]

It was excellent and effective in a packed theatre. Sorry you missed the experience. Pre-Colbert, he was the only person saying these things about Bush beyond a select circle. And the movie was hugely popular without "official" sanction.
- tom moody 5-03-2006 10:38 pm [add a comment]

"valid" seems like a strange word to use in this context, since what both Colbert and Moore do is use the freedom of their non-status to throw into question the validity of the messages coming from positions of power. Both are self-consciously posing as outsiders, adopting very particularly constructed individual characters through which to voice dissent. Moore poses as an emotional, passionate, man-on-the-street. Colbert poses as some kind of tightly wound right-wing psycho-freak. I would agree that Colbert's character is more transparent than Moore's. But while both are speaking to frustrated left-wing intellectuals, Moore is also explicitly speaking for frustrated low-income working class, and he is therefore less arch and self-reflexive.
- sally mckay 5-03-2006 11:46 pm [add a comment]

here cbs news blogger v vevers misses the point doubly by addressing the black out issue via todays belated nyt article and then shifts to discrediting blogging. then gets well dressed down by articulate commenters. i like : "He was talking about you. ", "So stop whining and learn how to use this new medium. " and this :

First off: the fact that the NYT did a story at all (after ignoring Colbert while trumpeting what a "hit" Bush was) is because of this incivility. This is what you fail to understand. We do it because IT WORKS.

How do we know? Fifteen years of kowtowing to GOP criticism. We've stopped defending the media because there's nothing left to defend. We are fighting for the integrity of journalism you have abandoned. Now that we've joined the game, you start whining.

Colbert's act had less in common with cable-channel comedy shows than with the work of Dario Fo, the Italian iconoclast who specializes in lese majeste (he likes to poke fun at the Pope). In this it resembled Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, but it was smarter than that propagandistic montage, and braver -- delivered live, as it was, in the belly of the press-corps beast it was skewering.

it certainly was brave! I am in awe.
- sally mckay 5-04-2006 4:53 am [add a comment]

"Pop Dadaist that he is, Colbert wasn't bombing so much as freaking his audience out for his own enjoyment."

If Moore had been invited into the belly of the beast, I'm sure he would have been brave. Colbert won't get a second chance, so now he's in the same boat as Moore.
- tom moody 5-04-2006 8:00 am [add a comment]

If the argument is that Colbert is a smarter guy, conceded. But so what? Unlike Colbert's speech, which I admired but didn't laugh that hard at, Moore's movies are funny. I still crack up thinking about the "Let's go smoke 'em out" montage. That Hollywood western clip he found was absolutely perfect.

Especially in a theatre, where everyone was dying for that laugh after 2 years of media war propaganda.

Pets or meat?
- tom moody 5-04-2006 8:06 am [add a comment]

no my point isnt that SC is braver or smarter than MM. i think we all agree with most of MM's socio/political possitions. but i dont think his later projects are what they appear to be. they appear to be rational investigations, like 60 minutes or bill moyers "now". thats not what they are. they are totally loaded with charged support materiel. they are button pushers that sell his point. his role as common man is played deadpan. no winks no nods. thats disengenious. im all for david using everything on his tool belt to slay goliath. its not a level playing field so david may employ anything necessicary since he's at a disadvantage. including emotional button pushing, sarcasm and ambush journalism techniques. that worked in a roger and me context but it underminds his (and our) moral high ground in columbine and fahrenheit. in those cases he still resolved the story with a david/goliath model but that is not his relations to those issues (wrongness of gun crazy american law and the corruptness of bush and co). those two issues would be better mediated in a "just the facts mam" bill moyers "now" style take down. one where the film maker is not part of the story. mainly because the evidence of wrong doing is so transparent and so profound. it doesnt take emotional button pushing or other exaggerated means to make the point because the strength of the evidence speaks for it self.

stewart begat colbert. the interesting part of the JS DS to me is the monolog and the interviews. i think we can agree that stewart pulls punches when needed. otherwise he wouldnt keep getting big gun guests like colin powell. i really dont have too much use for political skits, so i wasnt all that keen on SC prior to the banquet. I dont waste too much time on the onion either.

then something wonderful happened. they accidently book colbert for the WH press corps diner. they invited him, they fucked up. so SC betters yippee pieman aron kay and does something truly incredible. something john kerry forgot to do. something JS probably wouldnt/couldnt do. (visa vi mocking ironic endorsement) he read to bushs face a laundry list of corrupt acts that have been perpetrated on the american people and the world at large. and he used their lie of a setting to implicate press complicity. this was not an ambush, that banana cream pie was presented to SC on a platter. like hitting the guerilla comic lottery. they naively asked him to do his job. executed with pure honesty he gave everyone a big WINK to let us know he was in character and that it was SC CR business as usual. the wink came in form of the patented colbert "point" which said: "fasten your seat belts folks im getting ready to do the president - big time." as sally points out MM dont wink.

- bill 5-04-2006 9:43 pm [add a comment]

wapo still using hes not funny and smear blogging approach.
- bill 5-04-2006 11:41 pm [add a comment]

At a large public gathering, attended by the president, top officials and “celebrities” from various fields, a well-known comic personality lights into the administration and the media, accusing the one of malfeasance and the other of toadyism, and this, according to Steinberg and the Times, is not newsworthy. Is anyone expected to believe this?

The media buried Colbert’s routine because his comments, rather courageous considering the circumstances, spoke directly to their own role as accomplices of the administration. These are things that simply cannot be said in America.

One of the most dishonest and self-serving attacks on Colbert came from Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. Cohen, in his May 4 column, first returns to the theme: Colbert’s comments were not funny. But why should Colbert have confined himself to amiable, good-natured “ribbing,” as Cohen and others would have preferred? He was sharing the dais with a criminal. He must have realized that he had the opportunity to speak for millions, to tell Bush what he should be told for once.

Cohen further attacks Colbert as “rude” and “insulting.” “Rudeness,” writes Cohen, “means taking advantage of the other person’s sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.”

He continues, “Self-mockery can be funny. Mockery that is insulting is not. The sort of stuff that would get you punched in a bar can be said on a dais with impunity. This is why Colbert was more than rude. He was a bully.”

This is a remark worth considering. It is so preposterous that one has to consider the social and intellectual process by which it could have made its way into print.

Bush, along with his associates, is guilty of launching an unprovoked war, illegal under international law, responsible for the death and mutilation of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis and Americans. He has helped pitch the world forward toward potential conflagrations of horrifying dimensions. As a personality, he is a weakling and a sadist. No one should forget his presiding over 152 executions in Texas, and his mockery of the plea of death-row inmate Karla Faye Tucker for clemency. “ ‘Please,’ Bush whimpered, imitating Tucker, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’ “

Standing reality on its head, Cohen, however, accuses Colbert, who merely hints at the methods of this administration, of being a “bully.” In making this comment, Cohen speaks for the privileged, profoundly self-satisfied media elite. The Post columnist responds with venom to any signs of political or cultural life going beyond the bounds of the official consensus; hence, his bitter attacks on Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana and now Colbert.

Cohen and his ilk are not journalists, they are courtiers, part of the administration’s entourage. This insulated media world, where intermarriage is common, where reporters “cover” the activities of their drinking buddies.... Cohen personifies this ignorant, cowardly milieu. He is the type that has made “pundit” into a dirty word.

Cohen is also covering up for his own complicity in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. After initial hesitations, he signed on enthusiastically to the war drive in February 2003, following Secretary of State Colin Powell’s appearance at the UN, during which Powell made entirely false allegations about the Iraqi regime. Cohen claimed at the time that the “evidence he [Powell] presented to the United Nations—some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail—had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool—or possibly a Frenchman—could conclude otherwise.”

The columnist concluded, “If anyone had any doubt, Powell proved that it [Iraq] has defied international law—not to mention international norms concerning human rights—and virtually dared the United Nations to put up or shut up. There is no other hand. There is no choice.”

Many of the journalists in attendance at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner have similar track records. If they weren’t laughing at Colbert’s remarks, it’s no wonder.

TIME : "but seriously. was he funny? yes or no? WAS HE FUNNY!? WAS HE FUNNY OR NOT!!!!?????!!!!!!!!"
and a bunch of blogg condescension thrown in to for good measure.
- bill 5-05-2006 6:18 pm [add a comment]

I would say Wonkette has fallen far, but I never read her. Not mentioning the huge numbers of Colbert clip downloads (hundreds of thousands) and Colbert thank yous (It's up to 40,000 last I looked) seems like a dereliction of basic journalistic responsibility. Sad that she's taken the "it's just some angry bloggers 'debating' it" Bush party line.
- tom moody 5-05-2006 6:42 pm [add a comment]

i hope shes "wankette" of the day. telling embarrassing truths in front of the world is alot different than "hearing criticism" which we know bush almost never does. so nice to see ana marie has graduated to professional pundit so she can "tut-tut" the little people.
- dave 5-05-2006 7:19 pm [add a comment]

To the audience that would watch Colbert on Comedy Central, the pained, uncomfortable, perhaps-a-little-scared-to-laugh reaction shots were not signs of failure. They were the money shots. They were the whole point.

In other words, what anyone fails to get who said Colbert bombed because he didn't win over the room is: the room no longer matters. Not the way it used to. The room, which once would have received and filtered the ritual performance for the rest of us, is now just another subject to be dissected online. Colbert—as he might say on The Colbert Report—"gets it." So does his patron, Jon Stewart, who similarly was said to have bombed at the Oscars because he turned off the stars in the theater with a snide performance that was much funnier to the (much bigger and more relevant) audience at home.

All of this, in other words, is yet another sign of how authority is fragmented and democratized in the Internet era—the top-down authority to assess and interpret for the masses that used to be much of the raison d'etre of the room. So if the room wasn't too amused by Colbert Saturday night, you'll have to excuse them. They don't have as much to laugh about anymore.

I used to read James Poniewozik all the time when he wrote for Salon, during the Clinton era. I never looked at him after he went to Time. Funny to see him doing effective writing on the Time blog. It took him 6 years to get back to his element.
- tom moody 5-05-2006 7:42 pm [add a comment]

Wankette, on the other hand...
So pathetic, what she wrote.
- tom moody 5-05-2006 7:44 pm [add a comment]

The conspiracy theory is that the mic at the front of the room was a noise canceling mic, and although there was some tension in the room, people were laughing *much* more than was apparent on the video feed. This is *supposedly* what they did to Dean in the Iowa speech as well. When you watch it's like the person is talking to a dead silent room which makes you subconsciously think the person is doing very poorly. (Sort of the opposite of making a lame sitcom seem funny by adding a laugh track.)

But that's just something I read on the internets. I have no idea if it's true. The shots of the crowd seem to support the stony silence reading, but it's actually kind of hard to tell if you watch again with this in mind. It sounds at least plausible to me. "They" knew Colbert would be harsh but they couldn't stop it for some reason, so they planted the trick mic which they knew would help them reinforce their post speech spin which was that "Colbert wasn't funny" - and look what happened: nobody covered it because "Colbert wasn't funny."
- jim 5-05-2006 7:45 pm [add a comment]

• i dont think we need any tinfoil for this one. many of the barbs were pointed and washington elites are thin-skinned. plus, the reaction from the mainstream press would seem to reinforce the notion that they did not like what they heard.
  
  i liked a comment on kos which referenced a gandhi quote which i shall paraphrase.
  
  first they ignore you, then they make fun of you, then they fight you, then you win.
  - dave 5-05-2006 8:11 pm [add a comment]

"mesquite powered car" heh heh


- bill 5-05-2006 7:50 pm [add a comment]

Cohen said Colbert was just "rude". Actually, no. Saying "Fuck you, you, you fucking bootlicker; he was mocking you and your ilk for not doing your fucking job", hypothetically speaking, of course, would be rude.

The only person to whom Colbert was directly rude was Scalia, who, bless his theocratic little heart, laughed his ass off as Colbert repeatedly gave him the Italian hand gesture for "go take it up the ass". That was rude. And funny as hell.

The rest was satire of the quality and courage of Jonathan Swift.

- mark 5-06-2006 1:52 am [add a comment]

more here
- bill 5-13-2006 11:42 pm [add a comment]

Dear Reader,

Thanks for writing to us about the coverage of the White House
Correspondents' Association dinner. Mr. Calame addressed on his Web Journal
(nytimes.com/bryoncalame) The Times's coverage of the event.

Sincerely,
Joe Plambeck
Office of the Public Editor
The New York Times

Note: The public editor's opinions are his own and do not represent those
of The New York Times.

well heres the link. there was a typo in the web address. (the dudes name is byron) and i wont even post the text its so vapid.
- bill 5-16-2006 12:46 am [add a comment]

The response contains a small admission of blowing it by not covering Colbert, merely because his performance "would resonate in some quarters".

Hella weak.
- mark 5-16-2006 1:04 am [add a comment]

hella weak. thats what i call keeping the lid nailed down. now, 15 days later. is this even llinked to on the main page?
- bill 5-16-2006 1:23 am [add a comment]