Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Colbert in the Running for Slasher King

Colbert does a reasonably good job of slashing O'Reilly's dipshit plan for an army of mercs paid by a coalition of nations.   Bill O’Reilly Is PISSED That Stephen Colbert Mocked His Plan To Use A Mercenary Army To Fight ISIS

It's a good job of slashing ... but ... it's only O'Reilly and he's trivial.  He makes a lot of money for Fox News but he's paid to say deliberately stupid shit that makes a lot of money.  Sending Colbert to kill him is like taking a six-gun to catch goldfish.  You could probably do it but why bother.

Stewart is in the same trap in a perception the medium is the message is the problem.  To a point that's always true but the people on Fox News are just pimping off the possibilities.  It's not so much a flawed mechanism but flawed people and attacking them won't win the Kingship.

John Oliver is taking a fundamentally different approach and going after a specific concern, whether it's the travesty of management and deception behind the Miss America pageant or (cough) the travesty of mismanagement and deception behind the drone program.  He's a good distance away from personality clashes and he rises fast as a result of it.

Where Stewart and Colbert are reactive in terms of seeing something stupid or deceptive on Fox News and speaking about it, Oliver is aggressive in pursuit of a topic.  I expect this will serve him ... and us ... very well.


The biggest differentiating aspect is the audience they're trying to reach.  Stewart and Colbert are singing to the faithful and maybe wistfully hope some Fox News people will see some common sense.  This isn't likely to muster many or any new people with the willingness to vote and the knowledge and awareness to use it wisely.

Oliver appears to be broadcasting to a general audience to see what sticks.  I suspect slashing Fox News will be automatically alienating to a subset of people even if the case is valid, they just don't want to hear it.  Therefore, if the topic is approached from the standpoint of the inherent validity, integrity, etc of any particular thing rather than any particular network then I believe it's more likely people will be drawn into it to follow it, learn more.  If they have gone part way, likely they already know they won't like the answer but they want to know what it is.  In this respect, I expect Oliver is more dangerous to right-wing extremists than anyone else.

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