Did you realize this was a result of Stephen Colbert’s Green Screen Challenge?

Other entries of note: Elvis,  Pulp Fiction, Star Trek. Here’s Stephen with some others (the brain in a vat is especially fun).

Stephen asks Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr if he’s afraid the government will make him register his mustache.

And here’s a little something to look forward to from Stephen’s fans: John McCain’s Green Screen Challenge. It will be interesting to see if this turns into anything like some of the previous greenscreen challenges.

I’ve been watching for the fun mashups of the three speeches from the other night that are bound to come. If someone spots a good one, please point me to it.

Family Research Council president Tony Perkins went on The Colbert Report Tuesday to discuss his book, Personal Faith, Public Policy, as well as, of course, the California Supreme Court same-sex marriage ruling.PageOneQ:

“I’ve read the constitution forwards and backwards,” Colbert continued, “and I see nothing in there that protects gays.

“Why,” he asks Perkins, “do these judges keep seeing gay things in the Constitution?”

“They’re afforded the same rights and privileges as you and I are,” Perkins responded. “They don’t have a right to marry just as you and I don’t have the right to marry anybody we want to. We don’t have a right to marry our first cousin…” […]

“There is a reason,” Perkins continued, “that in public policy, that we work to strengthen and uphold the institution of marriage, because that is…really the building block for society.”

“Do you keep Kosher?” Colbert asks. “I think it would really be better for the anti-gay-marriage side if they obeyed everything in the Bible, not just the anti-gay-marriage part. Don’t you?”

“When did Jesus talk about gay people?” he presses further. “Because I keep on looking for that so I could win some arguments.”

Recently, Henry Farrell caused plenty of blogosophere buzz about research (pdf) demonstrating that The Colbert Bump — the phenomenon whereby those who appear on his show receive a bump up in their support — is realish. Thing is, it only works for Democrats!

The graphs:

Now Tony Perkins knows this. He knew what he was walking into and that we bloggers would be laying in wait. I’ve always believed one thing you’ve got to give to Tony Perkins and his crowd is that they totally and completely believe in their cause. I’ve always respected their willingness to go before a hostile audience and make their case:

PERKINS: We need to address all of the issues that concern people… If you ask your audience the issues that concern them I imagine that all of these issues somewhere would register, and as Christians…

COLBERT (to audience): Do any of these register with you?

AUDIENCE: No… Nah…No… No…

PERKINS: None of them?

AUDIENCE: No… (laughter)

COLBERT: Do you even know what they are?

AUDIENCE: No… (inaudible)

PERKINS: Why don’t you tell them?

COLBERT: It’s my show.

I don’t like Tony Perkins or his argument and I believe we will beat him fair and square in the public sphere. But I admire him for his willingness to put his arguments out there in every forum imaginable. I think he sees the writing on the wall, knows that the tide is turning and he’s going to lose and lose big and lose especially big with young people. So rather than duck that fight he goes on Colbert.

I’m a Democrat and I’d like to see more of us taking our message, taking our arguments, right out into the heart of the other side’s media message machine. And I’d like to see us do that with gay marriage and gays in the military and all of the rest of the social justice issues that I’d like to see at the heart of our message.

RELATED: The joyous news that NY Gov. David A. Paterson has directed all state agencies to begin to revise their policies and regulations to recognize same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions, like California and Canada.

Here’s video of the funny and eloquent speech the governor gave at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Leadership Awards dinner on April 7 on the subject.

The New Yorker has a piece on Katie Couric’s ill-fated voyage with CBS:

I don’t think that people want less news; they want, I believe, the same kind of informed passion and doggedness that TV-news people displayed while covering Hurricane Katrina, and they want anchors to go deep into issues. I would more than happily watch Brian Williams do an hour of news every night (and that’s not, I should say, because a member of my family works for NBC News). Who knows, young people might turn on their TVs in droves if news organizations had a few choice strands of Michael Moore’s DNA in them, and pointed out when, say, a public official wasn’t telling the truth. Jon Stewart is a lightning rod both for people who decry the notion that young people get their news from watching “The Daily Show,” and for people who think that his (and Stephen Colbert’s “The Colbert Report”) is the only current-events show worth watching. I’m not a Stewartite, but when Dick Cheney denies making certain statements about the war in Iraq and Stewart shows three video clips that prove he’s lying, I think he’s providing a real service to the country, and I’d like to think that that’s what his fans are responding to.

I absolutely do think that’s what his fans are responding to. And those who read blogs are responding to it too. The story tells us that “the viewership of nightly national news began to decline more than two decades ago, before the Internet and before cable news became a big deal.” The decline will continue. The format is dead.

But the story suggests the real reason for Couric’s problem:

CBS doesn’t appear to be all that interested in maintaining its news division; earlier this year, it was reported that the network was looking into using CNN feeds in order to reduce its news-gathering expenses. It costs CBS seven million dollars a year to run its Baghdad bureau, which does sound like a lot of money—until you realize that Couric makes about fifteen million dollars a year and, last year, Moonves made close to forty million. Couric is far from being the most important part of the story; her time at CBS will be, luckily for her, just a footnote to history, a very expensive Band-Aid that failed to stop the bleeding.

I continue to believe Couric could have done something good with the show.

While on the topic, On The Media had an interesting piece last week noting that in LA the Spanish language local news broadcasts lead in the ratings not because of sensationalist ratings grabber stories but, rather, because they do a better job.

This is Former L.A. Times reporter Joe Matthews:

[O]n many of these nights of the six weeks I looked at, there was a very big crime story. You would see it on both English and Spanish. But the difference in how the stories were covered sort of shows the philosophy.

In the Spanish-language broadcasts you’d see many more people interviewed, and not just crime victims but folks affected, a lot of questions asked about police conduct and police response that you never see addressed.

He says there’s really passionate advocacy in the journalism they practice that drives the stations to look at more serious social issues the other stations don’t cover.

Howard Dean was on The Daily Show last night. The interview was all smiles and laughs but chock-a-block full of important and substantive information. It went on for an unusually long 9 minutes and ran right up into the commercial break.

Stewart commented on Jeremiah Wright on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday’s shows and — in contrast to every other cable news show — his clear and conclusive emphasis was on how miffed with the media he was because “this issue which should have only had enough fuel to last one news cycle has somehow lasted eight news cycles.”

Now Stewart’s is not a news show. It doesn’t have to obey the “News” rules, so it is not able to speak with that “News” authority. No, Stewart’s is a comedy show.

And as my friend Bob Thompson, Professor of Television and Popular Culture and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, told me in an interview I did with him last month, that’s its blessing:

Any comic fool can rush in, where the angels of journalists and historians fear to tread. And as we know if we’ve ever watched any Shakespearian tragedy, fools can often be the wisest people on the stage.

Bob reminds us that comedy does not have to deal with the inconvenience of checking facts, getting multiple sources, or trying to get it right. Comedy gets to make stuff up! But it’s also able to intellectually explore lots of the stuff that neither journalism nor history can because they’re both so bound by facts.

That comic freedom has obvious attractions to intellectually active and politically engaged young minds. So I’m thinking that Stewart and his spin-off Stephen Colbert are out there dog-whistling to the youth-vote. And I’m wondering how accurate we’ve got that measured. Aren’t they — with their cell phones and non-traditional media habits — a demographic we’ve traditionally had trouble tracking anyway?

Maybe the Colbert bump holds a clue. It was in the news a while back as a legit phenom for Dems (Republicans need not apply). Thompson gives it the benefit of the doubt:

You know, some people might say, well how can this be? I think the burden of proof is on proving that there is no such thing as the Colbert bump. I think the common sense assumption would be that, yeah, there probably is. Until proven otherwise, that seems to be the commonsense thing that one would have.

Bonus video… Colbert on the formidable opponent. He’s got that right!

Today Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert kicks off his Pennsylvania coverage with a guest: MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. But is this symbolic for Campaign 2008 and journalism’s future? What’s the most effective way to deliver news to people on the Internet and to appeal to younger American voters? Video and web producer Joe Windish. offers this compelling original interview on the decline of traditional news an across-the-generations political information delivery system and the ascent of vehicles such as Comedy Central’s news-based comedy shows:

Stephen Colbert: A Media Maestro Plays Philly

by Joe Windish

The New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story this weekend was The Aria of Chris Matthews. Released to the web last Tuesday, bloggers had been baffled by it all week. Even Mark Leibovich, who wrote the story, noted that “three network officials asked me why I was writing about Matthews and not [Keith] Olbermann.”

The gist of the piece was that Matthews is an anachronism likely to be downsized when his $5 million a year contract is up next year. MSNBC’s now betting on Olbermann and David Gregory. Why the paper of record deemed it necessary to devote 8,000 words to that observation, I’ll never know.

Meanwhile, the whole way these guys are playing the cable news game seems a little passé to me. The big questions today are: how are we going to profitably port news over to the Internet, and how are we going to make it appealing to a younger demographic? Indications are that by either of these measures the leader in the cable news game right now is in not to be found at NBC, CNN, or FOX.

The hands-down champ is Comedy Central, whose Daily Show and Colbert Report have been playing by the fast and loose rules of comedy to beat journalism at the news game as far back as Indecision 2000. Since then Jon Stewart’s won two Peabody Awards for his election coverage, and he was joined just last week by Stephen Colbert when The Colbert Report won a Peabody of its own.

Today Stephen Colbert and his 80 staffers kick off a week of Colbert Report coverage of the Pennsylvania Primary from the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia. As it happens, Chris Matthews, a Philadelphia native, is slated to be Stephen’s first guest.

To put all of this into perspective, I called up Dr. Robert J. Thompson, Professor of Television and Popular Culture and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.

I first heard Bob speak on Radio Open Source after Colbert’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech. I first interviewed him after Colbert’s outstanding program on the WGA strike. We spoke again by phone last week:

JW: You’ve referred to comedy as The Fifth Estate. Can you explain?

BT: I started calling comedy the 5th Estate to keep the 4th Estate of journalism in check several years ago… I think this whole notion of comedy as the Fifth Estate really, in many ways, is more important in these new shows that are actually doing parodies of news shows because it’s the idea that the Fourth Estate is keeping those first three in check. The idea of what’s going on in Colbert and The Daily Show and even some of what Saturday Night Live and shows like that, is that it’s not only dealing with the political issues but it is dealing with the way in which the mainstream news operations are covering the issues.

Let’s take, for example, the classic example of what Jon Stewart did in the lead up to the war, when he was really examining that issue in a way that a lot of reporters were not for fear of being called unpatriotic and all the rest of it. The whole Dixie Chicks phenomenon. I think there Jon Stewart was a lone voice crying in the wilderness that this was the stuff that ought to be covered. And he was really making fun of – with evidence, showed the clip and that kind of thing – of how this was being inadequately covered by the traditional journalist operation. So there, I think, what Jon Stewart was doing was a really important message about the lead up to the war, but about the way it was being inadequately covered.

JW: What’s your take on Colbert’s Peabody?

BT: Certainly the Peabody is another feather in the cap of respectability that Comedy Central’s hour-long block in late night television has been garnering. That Peabody just goes on the mantelpiece right next to the invitation to speak at the Washington Correspondents Association Dinner, and all kinds of other things that have just been being heaped upon these shows. So, the Peabody is another example of how these late night comedy shows that Comedy Central are doing are really being taken very seriously by a whole range of people… Now we should remember that it also says something about the Peabody Awards. The Peabody Awards are one of my favorite of the awards given because they really don’t operate on the traditional criteria of what we think would be good. Let’s remember that Colbert got a Peabody I believe at the same time that Project Runway got a Peabody. Project Runway is not the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth estate! However, it’s a really good show and I think it deserved its Peabody as did Colbert, but for different reasons. When you think of when Comedy Central first started, and when you think of a lot of the other shows that are on Comedy Central, and you think of how Colbert does that whole act when he dances across the stage when he’s about to interview someone, it’s really pleasing to think that this is now the Peabody Award winning Stephen Colbert!

JW: Colbert is a really tough interview. There’s not a lot of fluff on his show. He brings on hugely complex topics and seems to help his interviewees make their point. And the arc of the show through a season is almost like a college course, he is educating his audience. I come away blown away sometimes. It seems like to me a very high-brow news show. Bring me back to earth Bob.
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