I also would be interested to note when faux news show such as Colbert are actually "taken seriously." To be fair, this isn't one of them. Colbert isn't "taken seriously," at least, not by Feith. Following the timeline, Colbert’s “misstatement” runs dangerously close to accusing Feith of treason, NPR rebroadcasts Colbert's statements as news, then Feith goes after NPR for the rebroadcast – not after Colbert for the misstatement. It is apparently only when Colbert’s statements are taken up by a “real” news program that they become dignified as accusations by Feith. Colbert’s statement is humor, NPR’s restatement is political, and thus warrants correction. This implicitly trivializes the humorous political text in favor of some sort of bona fide text. Reactions such as Feith’s call into question whether or not Colbert, as court jester, can “speak truth to power;” is power listening? Do those ostensibly in-power take humor seriously? What happens if they don’t? Anton C. Zijderveld (1982) notes that perhaps court jesters only reify the power of the monarch. He argues that the ridicule of court jesters is infrequent, usually shallow, and depends ultimately on the sanction of the monarch. This makes any power exercised by the jester parasitical to that of the throne: “The real point was that the monarch, by allowing his fool this kind of impudence, demonstrated in a rather painful manner how utterly powerless the rest of the court actually was. The fool, solidly and solitarily tied to the throne, was allowed to show off his politically innocent, parasitical power in order to demonstrate, as in a reversed, looking-glass manner, how utterly powerless everybody else outside the dyad of king and fool really was. To make things worse, king and jester would at times even swap roles, while everybody present was obliged to laugh heartily about all this folly. They were, of course, obliged to laugh about their own powerlessness!” (120). If correct (and I certainly hope he’s not), Zijderveld’s characterization severely limits what Colbert can hope to accomplish, and what we as consumers of media and political agents can do. By ignoring Colbert's comments and instead chastising NPR, does Feith reinforce that only comics can get away with such accusations? When accompanied by a laugh, this is what Joanne Gilbert (2004) has dubbed the “male guffaw,” a laugh by those in power that performs the joke as politically harmless and ineffectual. Ultimately, if we simply laugh at Colbert’s witticism, allowing NPR's retraction to stand, what do we accomplish? All that being said, what I love about Colbert’s unasked redaction is that he performs a move parallel to that of NPR – he takes no responsibility himself and passes the (absence of) censure down the foodchain. NPR admits that the quotation was flawed and corrects it. The wording itself here is comical to anyone with an ear for such things, yet it perhaps implicitly chastises Colbert. In any case, Colbert takes it upon himself to correct his statement, but in turn passes responsibility on to an unnamed intern. As he provided free content for NPR, so the intern provided free content for the Colbert Report, and for that both he and the intern deserve a stern wag of the finger, justice served. This may not be so much of a “bite” on NPR, as homage to NPR’s own savvy and somewhat humorous “faux apology,” which itself serves to hold officials accountable. Gilbert, Joanne. _Performing marginality: Humor, gender, and cultural critique_. Detroit, MI: Wayne State (2004). Zijderveld, Anton C. _Reality in a looking glass: Rationality through an analysis of traditional folly_. Boston, MA: Routledge (1982).