You’re seeing Trump bandy around the term "fake news" to describe some of our most venerated,
venerable, trustworthy institutions.
When the president is calling anything he doesn’t like “fake news,” yeah, it dislocates
the term.
It dislocates the idea.
I think in general what we’re seeing is an assault on the idea that there can be objective
truth, the idea that anything can stand above the political fray.
And, you know, he’s seizing on that.
But it comes out of a much, you know, it comes out of the polarization that the coverage
and the news media has been mired in for a good long time.
And he’s opportunistically seizing on it, but he didn’t invent it, right.
We’ve been in the era for a long time now of polarized talking heads spewing venom at
each other on cable news shows in what is supposed to be a fair and balanced and kind
of like equal playing-field situation.
But because objectively speaking some of these people are dealing with facts and others are
dealing with invented, imagined, biased nonsense there’s often, you know, creating that illusion
of a balanced playing field is difficult.
Like you can turn on the news and see like, “A Fair And Balanced Discussion of Climate
Change”.
And like on this side we have like this dude who’s got like, you know, a doctorate in
physics from Oxford and is like a triple Ph.D. in every relevant field and wrote six books,
all of which won the Pulitzer Prize.
And representing the other side is like Joe Schmucko from Illinois who like thinks global
warming doesn’t exist because he has a snowball in his freezer or some shit.
And these people are being presented as if they have equal credentials.
So, you know, the polarization that leads to the dislocation of truth, it’s got to
be – the blame for it needs to be spread around.
Like it’s been going on for a good long time.
Yeah, I mean satire is an incredibly powerful tool and weapon.
And I think we’re in an age where satire seems outdated.
It’ll come back around, but at the moment we are living in such an absurd world.
Trump and his administration, his cabinet, his cronies defy satire because they are more
ridiculous than anything that our greatest satirical minds can come up with.
So as you say we’ve moved into a phase where, you know, right now satire is not for the
masses.
Satire is directed only at the president.
Like Alec Baldwin’s entire audience on Saturday Night Live is essentially Trump.
We’re in a moment where Trump’s own advisors are letting it be known that the way that
they have to get his attention is to go on television.
He won’t listen to them if they’re in the same room together.
So they go on TV hoping that he will see them and listen because he apparently only pays
attention to things and people that he hears on screen.
So, you know, I think there’s a very real sense in which both the satire and the entire
sort of talking head infrastructure is increasingly directing itself solely at him.
It’s like, you know, this guy watches TV all the time.
He gets his news, he gets his information not from intelligence briefings, not from
this treasure trove of classified information that most people would be fascinated to delve
into, but from the same idiots that everybody else has access to.
Maybe satire isn’t dead.
That’s pretty absurd in itself.
I take it back.
Satire is very much alive in the form of Trump, you know, an audience of one for everything
that goes on in the media.