Fake But Inaccurate

Jonah Goldberg notices that the lines between fake news and real news are rapidly being erased. In an effort to try to pry younger viewers away from shows like The Colbert Report, television news is increasingly losing track of reality.

Or take Stephen Colbert, host of a fake cable news show, "The Colbert Report," itself a spinoff from the fake newscast "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." Colbert was recently a guest on "Meet the Press" — the Thunderdome of real news — as he was trying to mount a bogus campaign for president (abandoned Monday). Colbert stayed in character. So did Tim Russert, grilling Colbert as if he were a real candidate, of sorts.

The exchange vexed Ana Marie Cox, Washington editor of Time.com, who rightly ridiculed the stunt as "painfully so-ironic-it-was-unironic." Cox has a good ear for such things: Her own meteoric rise started with her tenure as the founding Wonkette blogger, where she mocked newsmakers the way robots mocked bad movies on "Mystery Science Theater 3000." Cox sized up the Colbert-Russert show as cringe-worthy — bad journalism because it was bad entertainment.

Williams fared better at "Saturday Night Live," successfully showing off his lighter side. But, as with Russert's stunt, it was another naked attempt by NBC to lure younger viewers back to real news. Indeed, while the network news broadcasts are sustained by the consumers of denture cream, adult diapers and pharmacological marital aides, it's "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" that have a grip on the hip, iPhone crowd. And plenty of those younger viewers seem to believe that they can deduce what's going on in the real world from jokes on a fake newscast. It's no longer funny because it's true. It's true because it's funny.

Goldberg points out that broadcast journalism has always been the most shallow of the various branches of the journalism tree. As Don Henley put it: "We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who comes on at five. She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye." In that respect, it really isn't much different today than it has been in years. But the older talking head set used to at least pretend to be journalists, even if they were nothing more than actors reading someone else's words. The blurring of the lines is not a good thing. As Goldberg concludes:

What I find dismaying is that "relevance" is literally coming at the expense of reality.

And that is a problem, isn't it?