We'll Miss You, George (Carlin) - TheCharlieWarnerReport

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I subscribe to Charlie Fink’s Quote of the Week, and the one Monday morning was from George Carlin, who passed away on Sunday and who said "I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately."

We’ll miss George, who, along with Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, was the Godfather of Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert – comedians who make us laugh while exposing an underlying truth.

It seems to me that it is indicative of the current state of television and the state of America’s culture in 2008, which television tends to mirror, that we are getting our collective version of the truth from comedians and not in the form of news and information filtered through celebrity-seeking, self-absorbed, biased, opinionated personalities.

Commercial television, especially cable television, is not giving us "a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day's events in a context which gives them meaning." Television news organizations are not committed to labeling commentary as such, keeping editorial opinion separate from news content, and "in presenting and clarifying the goals and values of the society." (The two quotes are from the five goals of the press as outlined by the Hutchins Commission in 1947.)

The nature of television is the culprit, I suspect. Self-absorbed exhibitionists are drawn to TV like a moth to a flame – they can't help it. They want to be on TV; they want to be famous. Celebrity is the goal, not truth telling or reporting. Thus, we have giants of grandiosity and needy exhibitionists like Bill O’Reilly, Lou Dobbs, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, Chris Mattews, and Keith Olbermann all bloviating with outrageous, noxious opinions, which makes them perfect foils for comedians.

Keith Olbermann has become a phenom because he straddles the fence between biased bloviating and comedy, but I suspect that some clever comedian will take deadly aim and soon join Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert on Comedy Central satirizing Keith's pompous, arrogant, angry, and over-the-top rants.

Comedians have done the country a great service through the years by uncovering the truth with satire and farce, and no one did it better than George Carlin. I hope Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Saturday Night Live acknowledge their debt to George and keep up their good work in bringing the truth to us through humor, for God and George know that we're not getting much of it from television news, now that Tim Russert is gone, too. Tim and George must be having a good laugh together over what's passing for news on television.

Frankly, I'm delighted that Tom Brokaw is taking over until after the election for Tim Russert on Meet the Press – the perfect and only choice for NBC. The country needs to see Brokaw back on TV regularly to remind us of the days when he, Peter Jennings, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, John Chancellor, Frank Reynolds, Howard K. Smith, Eric Sevareid, and, yes, Dan Rather in his younger years, were on television trying to give us a balanced, fair, intelligent account of the day's events before balanced and fair was a slogan and an Orwellian lie. To remind us of the days when comedians didn't make fun of newspeople -- they were journalists, not opinionated bloviators.

We'll miss you, George.

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