[lbo-talk] Conservatives Like Colbert too

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Thu Apr 23 04:36:40 PDT 2009


http://www.alternet.org/story/137918/

Why Do Conservatives Like Stephen Colbert?

By Lee Drutman, Miller-McCune.com Posted on April 23, 2009, Printed on April 23, 2009

<snip>

Colbert is, it would appear, a fun-house mirror to the deepest recesses

of your political soul.

In order to test this scientifically, Heather L. LaMarre, along with

Kristen D. Landreville and Michael A. Beam (all communications doctoral

students at The Ohio State University), subjected 322 participants with

a mix of political ideologies to a three-minute 2006 video clip of

Stephen Colbert discussing media coverage of the Iraq war with "super

liberal lefty" radio host Amy Goodman.

They then asked participants to evaluate Colbert's ideology and his

attitude towards liberalism. What they found was that the more liberal

participants reported their own ideology to be, the more liberal they

thought Colbert was. And the more conservative they reported their own

ideology to be, the more conservative they thought Colbert was. Both,

however, found him equally funny. The results are published in the

April edition of the International Journal of Press/Politics.

"Liberals will see him as an over-the-top satire of Bill O'Reilly-type

pundit and think that he is making fun of a conservative pundit,"

LaMarre explained. "But conservatives will say, yes, he is an

over-the-top satire of Bill O'Reilly, but by being funny he gets to

make really good points and make fun of liberals. So they think the

joke is on liberals."

<snip>

LaMarre got interested in the question of how audiences interpret

Colbert back in 2007, when she started puzzling over how several

appearances by Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee had

seemingly helped to jump-start Huckabee's campaign from out of nowhere.

Was it a joke? Or what?

<snip>

One parallel study the authors note is a 1974 article on perceptions of

the television show All in the Family. In the piece, professors Neil

Vidmar and Milton Rokeach found that although the show's creator,

Norman Lear, had intended to use the Archie Bunker character as a

gentle way to poke fun of and discredit racist attitudes, audience

members who held racist attitudes never quite got the joke -- instead

they sympathized with Archie Bunker and may have even found his folksy

prejudices to justify their own.

<end excerpt>

Michael



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