In blog time Stephen Colbert’s speech at the April 29 White House correspondents dinner is ancient history, though its glory will live forever. By mainstream-media standards Colbert spoke just the other day, but nothing he said was worth reporting.
In the days that followed, the Sun-Times, like the Tribune, printed not another word on Colbert–though Sun-Times Washington reporter Lynn Sweet acknowledged him online. When she asserted in her blog that Colbert had disappointed her–“Given the potential material, I expected better”–bloggers’ condemnation rained down. “It was the most electric and searing comic performance in a decade. You are insensate inside.” And “Come clean, Lynn. America is BEGGING for honest journalism.”
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The Opinionator is a New York Times-maintained blog that hailed Colbert as it drew withering fire on the Times itself. “Stephen Colbert’s remarks were so scathing,” said one contributor, “that none of the sycophants amongst the assembled would have dared to laugh for fear of being demoted or marginalized. The comedic tension he created simply blew the room away. It wasn’t a high score on the laff-o-meter he sought. Nope, he had a loftier ambition. (TO TELL THE TRUTH.)”
But they were questions posed by the new media and ignored by the old. This schism may call for another C.P. Snow, a scientist and author who made a career along the last century’s cultural fault line. “A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists,” he wrote. “Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: ‘Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?’”
