At this point, if we want to get our country out of this mess, we all need to reach down deep and find our inner balls.

So says thankyoustephencolbert.org.

What has this man done to inspire such internal searching for ones spiritual testicles? He appeared at the annual White House press association dinner, and really, really took the piss out of president Bush, his administration, anyone close to the administration, and everyone in the press corps who reports on it.

I won't repeat what he said here. All the links you need are at the website above, including the original footage. The Colbert effect will be my muse - his impact on the blogosphere and traditional news outlets.

I seem to remember something from an English class long ago: Shakespeare used jesters to tell the truth, where other characters could not. Reason being, he was dressed like a twerp, so no-one listened to him. Oh, and he was fictional anyway. Colbert was only mildly fictional, and not dressed like a jester. What he appeared to do, though, was spend twenty five minutes or so, sat not eight feet away from the leader of the free world, calmly telling everyone in the room what utter morons they were. And corrupt morons at that.

Oh, OK. Here's my favourite bit:

But, listen, let's review the rules. 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. Put them 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.

Funnily enough, the press corps didn't respond with even a light, warm chuckling. Neither did they seem to join in when Colbert repeatedly swiped at Bush. One could imagine self-censorship at work: "I like my job. I want to keep it. Its funny, but I can laugh inside, can't I?"

Now, it seems that Colbert didn't make it onto any of the major news networks in the following days. Plenty reported on the president mocking himself by appearing on-stage with a double... but any reference to what Colbert said was dropped.

thankyoustephencolbert.org has links to some excellent stories on what might be happening.

The Chigaco Sun Times talks about the Blogstorm - consisting half of people lapping up the event, and the other half seeing it as a lightening strike on a dark night, revealing a new media reality: the rise of the blog, the demise of the corporate news behemoths. (What is a behemoth anyway? Ah... "Something of monstrous size or power. A mighty animal described in Job 40:15-24 as an example of the power of God.")

Anyway, the Times:

How's this for a newsworthy lead? It was perhaps the first time in Bush's tenure that the president was forced to sit and listen to any American cite the litany of criminal and corruption allegations that have piled up against his administration. And mouth-tense Bush and first lady Laura Bush fled as soon as possible afterward.

Or as the Chicago Reader puts it:

If the AP had written the story the bloggers were collectively ratifying, it could have begun like this: “Truth was finally spoken to power Saturday night in Washington D.C., humiliating a fitfully laughing audience that consisted of the president of the United States and hundreds of squirming journalists. Power had no comment afterward.”

True enough: as with New Labour, media access and questioning is very, very carefully controlled. (Quite how Colbert got away with it is a question for another time. One theory I've been told is that, until two years ago, the Correspondent's dinner wasn't filmed, and typically the president would be openly laughed at. This may have been aided, one might think, by the fact that there's so much more material to work with these days...)

But it didn't make it into any headlines - or even into the dregs of stories. But

Ignoring a newsworthy keynote speech -- at an event the press corps itself set up -- doesn't go unnoticed anymore. Internet stables for liberals, like the behemoth [!] dailykos.com, began rumbling as soon as the correspondents' dinner was reported in the mainstream press, with scant word of Colbert's combustive address... The media's implosion of silence could be one of the final reasons many liberals use to not turn on TV news.

The Chicago Reader thinks along similar lines:

By mainstream-media standards Colbert spoke just the other day, but nothing he said was worth reporting... The Sun-Times trimmed the AP story by editing out Colbert’s quotes, reducing him to a passing reference. It was classic MSM [Mainstream Media] thinking: hey, space is tight, and where’s the news value in a comedian’s quips? But in the blogosphere, where space is infinite and communal wisdom decides what matters, MSM economies garner the contempt Matthew would have been due if his report on the Sermon on the Mount had blown off the beatitudes.

Here's the crux claim, then: new media's communal wisdom, with infinite blogspace to play in, is outflanking MSM. It's quicker, collectively smarter and more able to get to the truth, since individual errors will be corrected over time.

As the Reader goes on to say:

If this skirmish between old media and new had spent itself, never was the line between the two so clear. The old offers coverage, the new conversation. The old doesn’t like being part of the story and shrinks from characters like Colbert who insist it is. The new — like a colony of ants swarming over a dead wren — can’t separate its rapt attention to a story from the story.

Ah ha! Ants. Marvelous. Nowt like a bit of swarming insect analogy to make a story emergence-ful.

Similar claims have been made right here in Sheffield, about a locally-run discussion board. The writer - a freelance journalist - has seen many stories being broken on the discussion boards first. Often by the time the Mainstream Media get to it, inaccuracies have been corrected by further additions.

So - the questions I'm interested in.

1. The line between the two may be clear, but are we likely to see one cannibalise the space of the other, or the emergence of some new mix? Is it a real and growing cultural fault line? (Note: "When Washington Post political reporter Dana Milbank fielded questions online on May 5, most were about Colbert. Except they weren’t questions—they were pronouncements. The first had the press sitting idly by as Colbert was “revealing the truth about their complicity with the White House.” Another had the Post “and the rest of the White house lap dogs [sweeping] Republican shenanigans under the rug.” Milbank tried to give as good as he got, replying that he’d forward the latter complaint “to my colleagues Sue Schmidt, who won the Pulitzer last month for the Abramoff story, and to Dana Priest, who won the Pulitzer for exposing the administration’s secret prisons.” The Reader.)
2. How many people are blogging, or reading blogs? How many have access to computer information and news sources? Is this growing cultural fault-line also an economic fault-line?
3. This is really a question that's going to run right through my PhD work: is it a good idea to be so gaily skipping off into an ICT future, where all these new rules of emergent human interaction seem to be oozing into our public and private lives? Are we building on foundations of - ah ha ha - sand?
4. Lastly, a question that's intrigued me for some time. Clinton said of China's attempts to censor the tinternet that

that's sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall. But I would argue to you that their effort to do that just proves how real these changes are and how much they threaten the status quo.

But does it?

In this case, one might suppose that any internet growth in China is likely to equal further access to a vast market for US business. The internet was designed by DARPA to be indestuctible - and, certainly, military networks now probably are. But civilian ones?

Why does this matter? Because, if you're a 'realist' (in the political science sense), you think that the world is still a set of isolated states, acting in their self-interest. For the time being, it's in the US' interest to present the internet as a force of nature. But one can envisage a day where its costs outweigh the benefits. We get our internet via specific cables that go under the sea: I'm not sure how much gets around the world via satellite, or who's those satellites are. But its something worth thinking about.

The Reader again:

That media frenzy had produced a new Web site, thankyoustephencolbert.org, a 37 percent jump in ratings for Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, and an announcement on Yahoo’s “buzz log” last Sunday that searches for Colbert had jumped 5,625 percent in the previous week and were still “picking up speed.” But if you hadn’t been online you saw none of it.

I'm reminded of the 1976 film Network: Howard Beale, a news anchorman on a national US network, goes crazy - and starts telling people what he thinks. Ratings rocket. People start rising up... and so he's called in to the office of the over-arching super huge company (note: 1976! Wouldn't sound out of place in a riot porn background rant today, would it?)

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal -- that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West!

There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!, Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT and T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr.Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality - one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused...