It's Thursday, this must still be Belgium
In an era when the most hard-hitting journalists in the U.S. work for Comedy Central, when a genuine team of reporters from Kazakhstan in the U.S. to cover the November election could not conduct interviews because people assumed that they were working with Sacha Baron Cohen, and when the President's staff deride reality-based thinking, it was perhaps a miscalculation by Belgian television to broadcast a mockumentary with the premise that the federal government had dissolved. Apparently Americans are not the only people in the world who mix truth and fiction, or who have a hard time telling which is which. In any event, so far, no word of lawsuits.
3 Comments:
At 5:45 PM,
Caleb said…
The news story I read on the hoax commented that half an hour into the program a statement saying "this is false" came up on the screen, and that this was mandated by some sort of regulator that they had previously asked about the program, so they might have some sort of defence in regulatory compliance.
My question is, why hasn't the Daily Show or the Colbert Report gotten in trouble yet. A number of Daily Show interviews go to great lengths to make participants look like idiots - the interviewees might have some sort of misrepresentation claim. As for the Colbert Report, I believe I recall reading that Tom Delay's website (briefly) ran a clip of Colbert defending Delay, before taking it down when somebody realized it was a parody. That seems to be in the same sort of category as the Belgian show (although it would be hard to argue that Delay relied on the veracity of the Report in general)
At 10:59 AM,
Anonymous said…
That probably should be Comedy Central...
At 2:30 PM,
Michael C. Dorf said…
thanks dag. i made the correction.
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