CBS

By Lisa Van Dusen

February 1, 2017

It seems only fitting that Samantha Bee is staging a “Not the White House Correspondents Dinner” April 29 to cull the squeamish from the herd attending the conventional Hilton event which, this year, may or may not feature President Donald Trump’s stupendous elevation from punch line to headliner.

“The evening is sure to bring plenty of surprises, music, food, and laughter,” Bee said in a release Monday. “And if you’re not careful you just might learn something. Specifically, you’ll learn how screwed we’d be without a free press.”

As a comedian in the age post-truth, alternative fact-politics, Bee is one of the battalion of comics who’ve unexpectedly come to embody the Orwellian admonition that “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

The Toronto-born Daily Show graduate now hosting Full Frontal (on Comedy Central in Canada) has joined the irrepressible political voices of Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, Alec Baldwin, the rest of the Saturday Night Live cast, Jimmy Fallon and John Oliver in reacting entirely appropriately to previously unthinkable events while the media continue to grapple with exactly how to cover the high-stakes alternative reality unfurling in Washington.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut,” Trump advisor and Prince of Darkness/National Security Council-embed Steve Bannon was quoted as telling The New York Times on the same day last week that, here in Canada, the Public Policy Forum report with the aptly Hitchcockian title The Shattered Mirror pondered the impact of the demise of legitimate news gathering on the future of democracy, conveniently underscoring the value of reporting as a target of demagogues, hence its glaring indispensability to the future of democracy.

It’s not easy to scare people who forge nerves of steel taking on drunken stags and bachelorette parties week after week for years on end.

“It would be a mistake to romanticize the traditional news industry,” the PPF report warns, cruelly disregarding the current palliative benefits of romanticizing truth, civility, stability, diplomacy, predictability, reason, logic, grammar, punctuation, circumspection, the traditional news industry and what now seems like the dreamy utopia of 2016.

While The Shattered Mirror focuses on the economic decimation of a mainstream media existentially threatened by digitization, fragmentation and fake news, working reporters in America are living through the more immediate crisis of trying to cover the Trump administration based on norms from an expired reality, reporting hourly outrages at face value instead of within the frame of a familiar but domestically unprecedented meta-narrative.

Comedians don’t have that problem. They’re not hostages to a daily diversionary diet of tactically un-ignorable shiny objects including lies, belligerence, lies, insults, lies, chaos, lies, tantrums and more lies. They don’t have to worry about layoffs, access or reflexive deference while economics does for Steve Bannon what censorship, surveillance, harassment, intimidation, false arrests and smear campaigns have done to neutralize reporters in other jurisdictions.

It’s not easy to scare people who forge nerves of steel taking on drunken stags and bachelorette parties week after week for years on end.

For most of my career, I’ve been a reporter, columnist or editor. But for three years when my daughter was little and I was still at home with her, I was a professional stand-up comic in Washington. It was long enough for me acquire an enduring love and respect for comics, and to get a sense of the similarities between the two jobs.

Good comedians, like good reporters, are relentlessly curious. They are forensically observant, because their work depends on it. They’re conditioned to sort information and discern connections between seemingly disparate facts, and to instantly spot what doesn’t add up, what doesn’t make sense and what is downright absurd.

In pre-2016 American politics, reporters and comedians generally coexisted in the content space taken up by the 5 to 10 per cent of politics that veered regularly into the downright absurd. That percentage has now shot up to 90, and the war on truth has put us in the same foxhole.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine and a columnist for The Hill Times. She was Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP in New York and UPI in Washington.