In The truthiness hurts, Michael Scherer says, “Stephen Colbert’s brilliant performance unplugged the Bush myth machine — and left the clueless D.C. press corps gaping.”
In The Colbert Blackout, Dan Froomkin notes the lack of mainstream-media coverage of Colbert’s act — and how that’s been the big story on-line:
The traditional media’s first reaction to satirist Stephen Colbert’s uncomfortably harsh mockery of President Bush and the press corps at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Association dinner was largely to ignore it.Instead, the coverage primarily focused on the much safer, self-deprecatory routine in which Bush humorously paired up with an impersonator playing his inner self.
The result, however, was a wave of indignation from the liberal side of the blogosphere over what some considered a willful disregard of the bigger story: That a captive, peevish president (and his media lapdogs) actually had to sit and listen as someone explained to them what they had done wrong; that the Bush Bubble was forcibly violated, right there on national television.
Now the mainstream media is back with its second reaction: Colbert just wasn’t funny.
Yes, it turns out Colbert has brought the White House and its press corps together at long last, creating a sense of solidarity rooted in something they have in common: Neither of them like being criticized.
I have to wonder what’s going to happen to Mark Smith. Jacques Steinberg explains:
Mark Smith, a reporter for The Associated Press who is president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, acknowledges that he had not seen much of Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central before he booked him as the main entertainment for the association’s annual black-tie dinner on Saturday night. But he says he knew enough about Mr. Colbert — “He not only skewers politicians, he skewers those of us in the media” — to expect that he would cause some good-natured discomfort among the 2,600 guests, many of them politicians and reporters.What Mr. Smith did not anticipate, he said, was that Mr. Colbert’s nearly 20-minute address would become one of the most hotly debated topics in the politically charged blogosphere. Mr. Colbert delivered his remarks in character as the Bill O’Reillyesque commentator he plays on “The Colbert Report,” although this time his principal foil, President Bush, was just a few feet away.