For an artifact, I watched an hour of television. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are both satirical, left-leaning, political commentaries on Comedy Central. They are similar in structure and style, since The Colbert Report is sort of a spin-off of The Daily Show. Both involve mocking people or ideas to show how ridiculous they are. Stewart, of The Daily Show, has a straight forward approach, while Colbert parodies a conservative. His character is absurdly over-patriotic and selfish. He acts a bit like an Emperor, because his set is covered with American symbolism and a few pictures of himself.
The episodes that I watched both focused on the recent Republican Primaries. Stewart is quick to point out the hypocrisy of Mitt Romney during one of his celebration speeches. Romney scolded Obama for not keeping his campaign promises then proceeded to make a few lofty promises of his own. He said, "I will insist on a military so powerful no one would ever think of challenging it." Perhaps Romney was excited or taken out of context, but we all know politicians tend to make empty promises on the campaign trail. Both shows also examined the use of vicious attack-ads to gain voters. These ads are essentially imperial propaganda. There is no openness for interpretation. They present negative facts about other candidates, before literally telling you who to vote for.
Stewart's guest interview was with conservative Jim DeMint. According to Stewart, he and DeMint debated economics for over 25 minutes. From what I could gather from this interview, both believed that our economic problems (evil) are caused by ignorance and could be solved by reasonable debate. But, Stewart and DeMint seemed absolute in their opposing principles. In America, we are encouraged to believe that all problems can be solved simply by choosing the correct political party. This is somewhat of a modernist, totalizing approach. However, Colbert takes a more post-modern, apathetic view. He has a segment called End of the World of the Week. Perhaps he feels that our problems are too large to be fixed, so we should just laugh at them.
1. Do you think attack-ads are equivalent to propaganda?
2. Does America need to get more than two worthwhile political parties?
Excellent choice for analysis, Kyle. I think Colbert and Stewart are both doing really interesting work to "pull back the curtain" on politics through comedy and satire. In fact, there was a great article in the New York Times Magazine recently in which he speaks pretty directly about his Christian faith and the reporter describes how Colbert, in a sense, "subverts the empire": http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/stephen-colbert.html?pagewanted=all
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