Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [65]
Colbert makes the criticism explicit by changing other ways President Bush has described his policies into other religious-sounding plays on words. This rephrasing tactic doesn’t just color the arguments of politicians. It’s done to disengage them altogether from responding to and accepting criticism. Rather than engage in real dialogue about their (lack of) substantive disagreement, McCain’s strategy is to linguistically reframe his views so that they no longer look similar to Bush’s. Of course, this is not real democratic speech, as Colbert points out, in what he presents as a winking endorsement of McCain’s tactics: “Using language to turn failed policies into ideals that transcend debate is the best way to get people to think of you as ‘transcen-presidential’.”
Sometimes the suppression of criticism is not done by using opaque language, but by distorting the relative importance of the claims being made. As Colbert so often shows, media cover non-stories with the same kind of seriousness that they cover important news topics. When these less serious issues get serious attention, they appear to be more significant than they are. Thus, they take on an air of “factiness” as Colbert says.
In a recent episode, Colbert discussed a CNN story about Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, which compared Obama’s style of dress (collared shirt, no tie, dark blazer) with that of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He criticizes both the reasoning of the story and its representation as information that is factual and therefore news worthy.
It is a fact that Barack Obama dresses like Mahmoud “Ahmedinefrerejacqueijad.” It is also a fact that Mr. Obama is a carbon-based life form. Just like Osama bin Laden. If Obama really wanted to separate himself from our enemies, wouldn’t he try to be one of those sulfur-based tubeworms that live in the volcanic vents off the coast of Chile?127
These things are true statements or “facts,” but the implied conclusion is absurd nonetheless. The very presentation of such “facts” by a credible news source misrepresents the relative significance of all the claims being made. Is Barack Obama intellectually, politically, or religiously like President Ahmadinejad simply because they both eschew ties? Distorting the relative importance of a claim is often as effective as obscuring access to the truth itself, because the former blocks one’s access to dialogue about substantive political issues that matter to democracy. Colbert calls this common strategy of treating all “facts” as equally important “fighting facts with ‘facts.’”:
Until now, folks, my job has been to protect you from the facts. Now my job is to bring you the selected facts that will protect you. These will be real facts that I can prove, or you can’t disprove. To give you the real sense, the “factiness” if you will, of what’s going on in Washington. (Episode 3001)
Framing, slanting, and spinning further predispose viewers to respond favorably to the claims of purported truth-speakers. Use of affective language in particular reduces complex arguments to simplistic and emotionally-charged caricatures. If all terms of debate are reduced to emotional reactions rather than judgments informed by critical reasoning, then real debate cannot exist. These emotions may be powerful, filling viewers with fear or nationalistic pride. But under these conditions, the best we can do when confronted with others who disagree is assert opposed emotions, shame them, or otherwise terrorize them into agreement. To the extent that the news media adopts these argumentative tactics they stifle free debate.
If real, parrhesiastic criticism of political orthodoxy requires reliable access to good information and open discussion, then it is clear that media and political control over language frustrate this access. Either this control obscures the meaning of terms, misrepresents their relative importance, or cloaks them in