The Onion has a great interview with Steven Colbert in the current issue. Colbert got his start as a sidekick on Jon Stewart's Daily Show, and recently struck out on his own with The Colbert Report, a screamingly funny news-satire show that does an amazing job of lampooning traditional suck-up reportage. In the interview, Colbert talks about the philosophy of the show, how he became interested, and his favorite work with The Daily Show:
Because authoritarian means there's only one authority, and that authority has got to be the President, has got to be the government, and has got to be his allies. What the right-wing in the United States tries to do is undermine the press. They call the press "liberal," they call the press "biased," not necessarily because it is or because they have problems with the facts of the left–or even because of the bias for the left, because it's hard not to be biased in some way, everyone is always going to enter their editorial opinion–but because a press that has validity is a press that has authority. And as soon as there's any authority to what the press says, you question the authority of the government–it's like the existence of another authority. So that's another part of truthiness. Truthiness is "What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true." It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.
(Thanks, Robogeek!)
Update: August from Campus Progress points us to "an earlier interview with Colbert from July 2005, right before the main work on The Colbert Report started. Colbert spoke with Campus Progress about mocking our nation's foibles, meeting Bill Clinton, and making everything stupider."
