Friday, February 08, 2008

Honest fakes

On the question of whether Stephen Colbert can fairly be described as a "fake TV pundit," Richard Parks writes:
I look at it similar to the The Daily Show and Fox News dichotomy. The Daily Show is an unashamedly phoney news show. Fox News CLAIMS to be a real one. Yet studies have shown that the average The Daily Show viewer is much better and more accurately informed than the average viewer of Fox News.
Something similar must have happened in Britain in the early 1960s with That Was the Week That Was. Quoth Wikipedia:
After two successful seasons in 1962 and 1963, the programme did not return in 1964, as this was a General Election year and the BBC decided it would be unduly influential.
On a more personal note, I knew quite a lot about the "adult" movies of the early 1970s, and had a precocious appreciation for them, even though I was allowed to see none of them -- because I religiously read and studied the parodies of them in Mad magazine. And in adulthood, whenever I'm in England and want to know what's really going on, I read Private Eye.

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