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By Root 703 0

Modern theories of media consumption tends to fall along two broad lines: those who view mass media as a sort of “narcotic” that eliminates agency on the part of viewers, and those who see it as offering opportunities for critique and consequently for resisting the encoded message. It seems clear that The Colbert Report blurs these two theoretical lines. On one hand, Colbert plays up his role as a culture warrior-pundit whose every word on any subject is received as gospel; on the other, his viewers actively play the role of passively gobbling down what he’s selling. Faux-apologist for narrowly-defined American values that he is, Colbert celebrates that audience torpidity. What’s striking—and potentially new—about The Colbert Report is that the audience is in on the joke, performing the part of the torpid audience.

As a stance toward viewing audiences, therefore, freem can be thought of as both a revisionist take on early capitalist representations of profuse consumption, and a radical encapsulation of the current phase in the history of American media consumption, wherein our self-conception as consumers has given us the illusion of being free at the very moment when we are most bombarded with consumerist ideologies. Such a state was described by sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) in his early work, The Consumer Society. In the early 1970s, long before cable and the twenty-four hour news cycle, he observed how mass media’s distillation of world events essentially placed those events in the category of consumable goods. Baudrillard writes:

This careful balance between the discourse of ‘news’ [information] and the discourse of ‘consumption,’ to the exclusive emotional advantage of the latter, tends to assign advertising a background function, to allot it the role of providing a repetitious, and therefore reassuring, backdrop of signs against which the vicissitudes of the world are registered through an intermediary. Those vicissitudes, neutralized by editing, are then ripe, themselves, for simultaneous consumption.209

In this account, mass media offers a picture of world events in bite-sized (“ripe”) pieces that the viewer knows will eventually be followed by advertising. Thus, we’re called on to consume news in the same way we’re called on to consume the breakfast cereal or cars or (increasingly) pharmaceutical drugs whose commercials sponsor the broadcasts.

Baudrillard’s reading is uncannily prescient, especially if we consider that, nowadays, the news personality is part of the package we are consuming, from Anderson Cooper and Keith Olbermann to Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Visit The O’Reilly Factor’s webpage, and you will be offered the opportunity to buy t-shirts, fleece and outerware, coffee mugs, or signed copies of O’Reilly’s latest book. Not all media websites so blatantly seek to sell specialty products, but they all contain advertising of one sort or another.

The simultaneously empowering and enfeebling logic of freem extends to the ways in which Colbert co-opts the Colbert Nation for meaningless acts of protest and activism. For a brief period, the online, reader-produced encyclopedia Wikipedia contained the untrue fact that African elephants were not endangered. Colbert had called on the Colbert Nation to change unpleasant reality by changing the elephant population estimate to take the species off the endangered list. Colbert also had an impact on a Hungarian bridge-naming contest. By urging his fans to vote for him, Colbert actually won the contest, only to find out from the Hungarian ambassador to the U.S, good-naturedly playing along, that the winner of the contest had to be a Hungarian citizen.

When the real Stephen Colbert suffered a broken wrist (he tripped while running around the set during the audience warm-up), the fake Stephen Colbert peddled red plastic WristStrong bracelets to raise awareness of “wrist health.” Occupying a liminal position between parody of activist awareness campaigns and actual corporate product, the WristStrong bracelet simultaneously signified ironic