Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Fakery, or Defending Quayle and FEMA

Jonah Goldberg is, um...objecting to Saturday Night Live's mockery of the fake FEMA press conference (and the blocked promotion for the director who ran it) because, um, Weekend Report is fake news itself? And Colbert was a jerk for running for President, or something.

Really, Jonah, this is stretching it. The topics just flow and drift as you start with a failure of a group tangentially related to Bush, and end up relating it to the litany of faults you find with the mentality of the "hip, iPhone crowd."

But how about you get to the heart of it?
The problem of parsing fact from fiction, news from entertainment, has been inherent to broadcast journalism from the beginning. Radio newsman Walter Winchell got his start in vaudeville. But in the modern era, I blame "Murphy Brown," the show about a fictional TV newswoman who talked about real newsmakers as if they were characters on her sitcom. When Brown had a baby out of wedlock, Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the writers of the show. Liberals then reacted as though Quayle had insulted a real person - and so did the fictional Brown, whining about how she'd been personally attacked. Ever since, journalists and politicians have been playing themselves in movies and TV series, perhaps trying to disprove the cliche that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.
Murphy Brown ruined America! An old classic.

Update: I guess when reality makes you look like a fool, the only option left is to focus on the "fakeness" of media! Michelle gets into it, too, with her latest spin on "faux hate crimes" and everything else she can think of that proves that all the shit we're pissed about can't actually be trusted to exist.

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