But the adulation from the media, in particular, is surprising. After all, Colbert is mocking us. He’s a political critic, sure, but he’s also, and more so, a media critic. (That’s what makes Colbert’s “run for office” so brilliant: it expands the field of his satire specifically into the realm of politics. Colbert is now both a faux-journalist and a faux-politician; he’s now an equal-opportunity mocker.) Remember the speech Colbert gave at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last year? The press coverage it received focused on Colbert’s criticism of the Bush administration, but Colbert was just as harsh on the media:

Here’s how it works: the president makes decisions. He’s the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know—fiction!

Colbert has, according to Vanity Fair, compared the press to a “lamprey that latches onto a subject and just sucks and sucks and sucks until your brain and your soul is as dry as a crouton.” During his Meet the Press interview, he told Russert, “I’m a member of the media—and I don’t trust us.” Colbert has leveled many of these criticisms in character, as a die-hard conservative, deriding in particular the news outlets he views as “liberal.” (He visibly shudders at the mere sight of a copy of The New York Times, claims “NPR” stands for both “Nancy Pelosi Radio” and “Nazi-Palestinian Radio,” etc.). Colbert is mocking, in particular, the Bill O’Reillys and Sean Hannitys of the world, satirizing their egocentric worldviews and their baffling ability to put the ‘me’ in ‘media.’ Yet his character is, at its core, an amplification of the criticisms leveled at the press—as a general body—of being [fill in clichéd negative stereotype here]. James Poniewozik summed it up in TIME magazine last year: “Colbert is…spoofing the general trend in news to pander to emotion, to value graphics over thinking, gut over brain.” He’s mocking the mediocrity of the mediacracy.

And—the juiciest, truthiest Colbertian irony of all—we in the media love him for it. We thank him for it. It’s a kind of Stockholm syndrome for a media environment defined both by saturation and satire: Colbert derides us, and we eat it up. We ask for more. And we dub our abuser modern media’s “favorite fake pundit.”

Call it meanness envy. Colbert, after all, has a power the MSM doesn’t: he can criticize politicians—and the media itself—with virtual impunity. Colbert’s most famous line from the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner speech—“reality has a well-known liberal bias”—is almost a rallying cry for many in the media. Yet most reporters would never write, let alone imply, such a thing for fear of justifying the familiar cliché of the “liberal media.” Colbert can speak truth to power in a way the MSM cannot; what most in the MSM either can’t or won’t say, Colbert shouts through the megaphone of satirical implication. “We claim no respectability,” Colbert told Maureen Dowd in a 2006 Rolling Stone interview. “There’s no status I would not surrender for a joke. So we don’t have to defend anything.” Colbert, even more so than Jon Stewart and his straight-man schtick, enjoys satire’s safety net: it’s not Stephen Colbert who’s making the mischief, but a fictional character who happens to share that name. (Indeed, media treatments of Colbert, particularly the long treatises in Vanity Fair, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, and the like—go out of their way to point out the nearly clichéd niceness of Colbert-the-guy: Sunday school teacher, devoted husband and father, wearer of rumpled khakis and Merrell sport clogs.) Colbert-the-pundit is a fiction; and you can’t retaliate against something that doesn’t exist.

As for Campaigniness ’08, it’ll be interesting to see how far Colbert takes the “run”—and how far the media will go in running along with him. Thus far, he seems to be going out of his way to make clear that it’s a joke. (At a book-signing event in New York this week, Colbert responded to the crowd’s cheering of his dual-ticket run: “I hope you all enjoy losing twice,” he said.) Still, as Colbert writes in I Am America (And So Can You!), “It is time to impregnate this country with my mind.” With the media’s help, he seems to be doing just that.

• 1
• 2