Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner
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On April 29, 2006, comedian Stephen Colbert was the featured entertainer for the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, delivering a 20-minute speech and video presentation which was broadcast live on C-SPAN and MSNBC. In the same character as the one he plays on The Colbert Report, an over-the-top send-up of a conservative pundit in the fashion of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, Colbert mocked the Bush administration and the White House press corps.
Colbert spoke directly to the president several times, satirically praising his foreign policy, lifestyle, and beliefs, and referencing his low approval rating and popular reputation. Colbert followed his speech with a prepared video, featuring Helen Thomas, where he pretended to be Bush's new press secretary after the departure of Scott McClellan, trying desperately to avoid Thomas's questions in a parody of a horror film.
While mocking Bush has become common in various forms of political satire and has made an almost nightly appearance on American late-night talks shows, Colbert had the rare opportunity to deliver his routine while standing only a few yards from the president. Various reports give an impression that Bush did not take too kindly to the performance, as several of Bush's aides and supporters walked out during Colbert's speech, and one former aide said that the President had "that look that he's ready to blow". Although President Bush shook Colbert's hand after his presentation, Colbert received an icy response from the First Lady.
Reaction to the event caused it to become an Internet and U.S. media sensation, and ratings for The Colbert Report soared 37% in the week following the speech. Time magazine concluded that "Days after Stephen Colbert performed at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, this has become the political-cultural touchstone issue of 2006—like whether you drive a hybrid or use the term 'freedom fries.'"
Performance at the dinner
Colbert delivered his remarks as the satirical character he plays on The Colbert Report. Many of Colbert's jokes were directed at President Bush, while other jokes lampooned the journalists and other figures present at the dinner. Although most of the speech was prepared specifically for the event, several segments were lifted, largely unchanged, from The Colbert Report, particularly from the opening "truthiness" monologue on the first episode of the show, where Colbert advocated speaking from "the gut" rather than the brain, and denounced books as "all fact, no heart". Colbert framed this part of the speech as though he were agreeing with Bush's own philosophies, saying that he and Bush are "not brainiacs on the nerd patrol", thus indirectly criticizing Bush with his anti-intellectualist tirade.
Following this introduction to his style and general philosophy, Colbert listed off a series of absurd "beliefs that I live by", such as "I believe in America. I believe it exists." He also alluded to outsourcing to China, and satirized the traditional Republican opposition to "big government" by referencing the Iraq War, saying, "I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq."
Colbert then segued into a segment poking fun at Bush's sinking approval ratings, which were 32% at the time of the dinner:
- "Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality". And reality has a well-known liberal bias. ... Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it's two-thirds empty. There's still some liquid in that glass, is my point. But I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash."
- "I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound—with the most powerfully-staged photo ops in the world."
- "Over the last five years, you people were so good—over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. ... And then you write, 'Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.' First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!"
At the end of his monologue, Colbert introduced what he characterized as an audition video to become the new White House Press Secretary. The video was then shown, and the audience's reaction was not included in the broadcast. The video spliced clips of difficult questions from the White House press corps with responses from Colbert as Press Secretary. Colbert's podium included controls marked "eject", "Gannon" (a reference to erstwhile White House reporter Jeff Gannon), and "volume", which he used to silence a critical question by David Gregory.
After getting fed up with the questioning, Colbert fled the briefing room and the White House, only to be pursued by Helen Thomas, who has been a vocal critic of the Bush administration.Eisele, Albert; Jeff Dufour, [Under the Dome] The Hill, July 28, 2005. URL accessed on June 6, 2006.[Press Conference of the President] The White House, March 21, 2006. URL accessed on June 6, 2006. The footage of Thomas' pursuit of Colbert is not spliced, as Thomas had agreed to participate in the video. At one point, Colbert picks up an emergency phone and explains that Thomas "won't stop asking why we invaded Iraq". The dispatcher responds with, "Hey, why did we invade Iraq?" The entire second half of the video is a spoof of horror film clichés, with melodramatic music accompanying Thomas's slow, unwavering pursuit of Colbert, and Colbert loudly screaming "No!" at various intervals.
Colbert received a largely chilly reception from the audience. His jokes were mostly met with awkward silence and muttering, apart from the enthusiastic laughter of a few in the audience, such as Antonin Scalia. This was in stark contrast to the warm reception that Bush received at the event for his skit with impersonator Steve Bridges, which immediately preceded Colbert's monologue. Lloyd Grove, gossip columnist for the New York Daily News, said that Colbert "bombed badly", and BET founder Bob Johnson remarked, "It was an insider crowd, as insider a crowd as you'll ever have, and [Colbert] didn't do the insider jokes." Congressional Quarterly columnist and CBS commentator Craig Crawford found Colbert's performance hilarious, but observed that "only a handful of folks at the tables around me were visibly amused." Time magazine TV critic James Poniewozik thought that Colbert's critics missed the point. "Colbert wasn't playing to the room, I suspect, but to the wide audience of people who would later watch on the Internet. If anything, he was playing against the room." Poniewozik called the pained, uncomfortable reaction of the audience to Colbert's jokes, "the money shots. They were the whole point."
Internet sensation
Even though Colbert's performance "landed with a thud" among the live audience, a clip of Colbert at the dinner became an overnight sensation, turning into a viral video that spread across numerous websites in various forms, with the sites that offered the video seeing massive increases in their traffic.According to CNET's News.com site, Colbert's speech became "one of the Internet's hottest acts". Searches at Yahoo! on Colbert were up 5,625%. During the days after the roast, Google saw twice as many searches for "C-SPAN" (the station that broadcasts the event) as for "Jennifer Aniston" — an uncommon occurrence — as well as a surge in Colbert-related searches. Clips of Colbert’s comic tribute climbed to the #1, #2, and #3 spots atop YouTube's "Most Viewed" video list. Before YouTube took down the video under pressure from C-SPAN, the various clips of Colbert's speech had been viewed 2.7 million times in less than 48 hours. The popular blog Crooks and Liars, one of the first places to host the video, recorded their busiest day on record. In an unprecedented move for the network, C-SPAN demanded that YouTube and iFilm remove unauthorized copies of the video from their sites. Google Video subsequently purchased the exclusive rights to retransmit the video, and it remained at or near the top of Google's most popular videos for the next two weeks.
Both Editor and Publisher and Salon, which published extensive and early coverage of the Colbert speech, drew record and near-record numbers of viewers to their web sites. 70,000 articles were posted to blogs about Colbert's roast of Bush on the Thursday after the event, the most of any topic, and "Colbert" remained the top search term at Technorati for over a week.[[Citing sources citation needed]] A website called [Thank You Stephen Colbert], created by blogger Greg Felice, logged almost 50,000 "Thank You's" within its first five days of existence. Chicago Sun-Times TV Critic Doug Elfman credited the Internet with promoting an event that would have otherwise been overlooked, stating that "Internet stables for liberals, like the behemoth dailykos.com, began rumbling as soon as the correspondents' dinner was reported in the mainstream press, with scant word of Colbert's combustive address."
Three weeks after the dinner, audio of Colbert's performance went on sale at the iTunes Music Store and became the #1 album purchased, ahead of new releases by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, and Paul Simon. C-SPAN also sold DVDs of the event, but costing over twenty dollars more than the iTunes album or the free video available at Google, they only sold a few thousand in the weeks following the event.
Early press coverage
Cable channel C-SPAN broadcast the White House Correspondents Dinner live on Saturday, April 29, 2006, and rebroadcast the event several times in the next 24 hours. C-SPAN also aired a segment that included the guests arriving, followed by Bush's skit, that excluded Colbert. The trade journal Editor and Publisher was the first news outlet to report in detail on Colbert's performance, which it called a "blistering comedy 'tribute'" that "left George and Laura Bush unsmiling at its close" and "quite a few sitting near him looked a little uncomfortable at times, perhaps feeling the material was a little too biting — or too much speaking 'truthiness' to power."On the May 1, 2006 episode of The Daily Show, on which Colbert was previously a correspondant, Jon Stewart called Colbert's performance "balls-alicious" and stated that "We've never been prouder of him, but HOLY SHIT."
The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune both covered the dinner, but neither contained coverage of Colbert’s comic tribute. The wire services Reuters and the Associated Press each set aside three paragraphs to cover Colbert's routine in their articles on the event, and The Washington Post mentioned Colbert several times throughout its article. The most extensive print coverage came from USA Today, which dedicated more space to Colbert’s performance than to President Bush’s skit. Videos on the web sites of CNN and Fox News had clips of the Presidential comic routine, but no footage of Colbert's satirical performance. On their morning shows, the Monday after the event, the three major networks and CNN's American Morning played clips of Bush's routine, but did not include footage from Colbert's portion of the event. The day after the dinner, Howard Kurtz played clips of Colbert's performance on his CNN show Reliable Sources. On the Fox News show Fox & Friends, the hosts mentioned Colbert's performance, criticizing him as going "over the line." Tucker Carlson, on his MSNBC show The Situation, further criticized Colbert as being "unfunny."
Allegations of a media blackout
Among liberals, the popularity of Colbert's dinner speech was mixed with indignation at the press corps for, as they saw it, snubbing Colbert even though he was the featured entertainer for the evening. Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin called it "The Colbert Blackout" and lambasted the traditional media for ignoring Colbert and instead focusing "on the much safer" routine where President Bush was joined onstage by a Bush impersonator. Media Matters was especially critical of television news. They reported that ABC's This Week, NBC's Sunday Today, the NBC Nightly News, the morning shows of the three major networks, and CNN's American Morning all focused on Bush's skit and "ignored Colbert entirely." Media Matters also contrasted various news outlets' failure to cover Colbert to the extensive coverage that Don Imus drew for his controversial roasting of Bill Clinton at the 1996 Radio and Television Correspondents' Association Dinner. Columbia School of Journalism professor Todd Gitlin remarked, "It's too hot to handle. [Colbert] was scathing toward Bush and it was absolutely devastating. [The mainstream media doesn't] know how to handle such a pointed and aggressive criticism." American investigative journalist Robert Parry conjectured that Washington journalists felt pressure from both the White House and "right-wing media attack groups" to rein in their reactions to Colbert's material, as well as their coverage of it the next day.However, others saw no intentional snub of Colbert by the press. Responding to a question about why the Washington Post's article about the dinner "did not convey with any specificity what Colbert had to say," Media Backtalk writer Howard Kurtz responded, "The problem in part is one of deadline. The presses were already rolling by the time Colbert came on at 10:30, so the story had to be largely written by then...".Asked why television news favored Bush’s performance over Colbert’s, Elizabeth Fishman, an assistant dean at the Columbia School of Journalism and a former 60 Minutes producer, told MTV that the "quick hit" for television news shows would have been to use footage of Bush standing beside his impersonator. "It's an easier set up for visual effect," she noted. Steve Scully, president of the White House Correspondents' Association (which hosted the dinner) and political editor of C-SPAN (which broadcast the dinner), scoffed at the whole idea of the press intentionally ignoring Colbert. "Bush hit such a home run with Steve Bridges that he got all of the coverage. I think that exceeded expectations. There was no right-wing conspiracy or left-wing conspiracy." Time columnist Ana Marie Cox called the allegations of a deliberate blackout a "fake controversy" because Colbert's performance got coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major wire services. Fellow commentator Kurtz concurred, noting that not only was the video carried on C-SPAN and freely available online, but also he himself had played two clips on his own CNN show, "so apparently I didn't get the memo."
On May 3, 2006, The New York Times published an article addressing the controversy. The paper acknowledged that some had "chided the so-called mainstream media, including The New York Times, which ignored Mr. Colbert's remarks while writing about [Bush’s] opening act." The Times then quoted several passages of Colbert's more substantial criticism of the president and covered various reactions to the event. On May 15, the New York Times Public Editor, Brian Calame, wrote on his blog that more than two hundred readers had written to complain about the exclusion of any mention of Colbert from the initial, lengthy article covering the dinner. Calame said the fact that the Colbert speech had been mentioned in a later article "didn't explain why Mr. Colbert didn't make The Times in the first place."
Praise and criticism for Colbert
Colbert's performance found a wide variation of positive and negative reactions from the media. In some of the most literary praise written about the controversy, CBC columnist Heather Mallick wrote, "Colbert had the wit and raw courage to do to Bush what Mark Antony did to Brutus, murderer of Caesar. As the American media has self-destructed, it takes Colbert to damn Bush with devastatingly ironic praise." Radio host and comedian Al Franken, who performed at the dinner twice during the Clinton administration, said, "I thought that what Stephen did was very admirable."Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, however, found Colbert's jokes "lame and insulting." and wrote that Colbert was "rude" and a "bully." Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer felt that Colbert "crossed the line." Defending President Bush, Hoyer told the newspaper The Hill, "He is the president of the United States, and he deserves some respect." Right-wing pundit Mary Matalin labeled Colbert's performance a "predictable, Bush-bashing kind of humor."
Responding to critics who felt Colbert went over the line with his performance, Jon Stewart remarked, "apparently [Colbert] was under the impression that they'd hired him to do what he does every night on television." Attorney and columnist Julie Hilden concluded that Colbert's "vituperative parody" might have been unfair in First Amendment terms under different circumstances, but that Bush's record of controlling potential criticism created a heightened justification for others to criticize him when they could get the chance.
Ana Marie Cox chastised those who praised Colbert as a hero. "I somehow doubt that Bush has never heard these criticisms before." She added, "Comedy can have a political point but it is not political action."
Media Matters and Editor & Publisher noted what they saw as hypocrisy among Colbert’s critics in the press. They contrasted the critical reaction to Colbert to the praise that many in the press had for a controversial routine that President Bush performed at a similar media dinner in 2004, where Bush was shown looking for WMDs and joking, "Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere!" and "Nope, no weapons over there!". Attorney and best-selling author Glenn Greenwald suggested that the press showed special animosity toward Colbert because Colbert had the courage to stand up to the President where the press had not.
The New York Times published five letters to the editor on Colbert's performance in its May 3 and May 4 editions — all of which were strongly supportive of Colbert, and some of which were critical of The Times for reporting only critical reactions.
Fox News ran a short two minute segment on the controversy, detailing the fight between Richard Cohen and liberal bloggers. The piece was highly critical of Colbert, and included only media pundits who criticized his performance. The label applied to the video item on Fox News website read "Colbert bombs at media dinner".[[Citing sources citation needed]]
Arianna Huffington reported that Colbert told her he had "strenuously avoided reading anything about his appearance," and personally remained unaware of public reactions to it. Colbert's wife, Evelyn, said she was considering tracking down and saving references from publications and blogs so that Colbert could read something about the public reaction if he chose to at a later time.
References
External links
- General
- *[ThankYouStephenColbert.org]
- *[Who Else Loves Stephen Colbert] Colbert Fan Discussion Group
- *["So Not Funny" - Washington Post]
- **[McJoan (DailyKOS) response to "So Not Funny"]
- *[Media Matters article alleging a media blackout]
- Audio & Video
- *[Google Video] - Video of the event. Requires Macromedia Flash.
- *[C-SPAN store] - DVD of entire dinner
- *[C-SPAN] - Video of the event. Colbert's speech starts approximately 65 minutes into this video. Requires RealPlayer.
- *[Salon] - Video of the event. Requires QuickTime.
- *[Film Portal] - Video of the event. Requires Windows Media Player. Both streaming and downloadable video available.
- *[Democracy Now!] - Video and audio of the event. Requires RealPlayer for video or any MP3 player for the downloadable audio file.
- *[files.ww.com] - Video of the event. (MPG format)
- *[AOL] - Video of the event. Requires Internet Explorer. When Colbert shows his pre-recorded "audition" video (start viewing at 16:40), the camera is focused on Bush's reaction. Click icon beneath lower-right corner of video to view full screen.
- *[ABC News] - Video of the event. Requires Windows Media Player. When Colbert shows his pre-recorded "audition" video, the camera is focused on Bush's reaction.
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