Fake journalism, real consequences

Subverting the message
That means “Daily Show” correspondents are more likely these days to have to subvert someone’s message than maybe they did a few years ago, when nobody saw it coming and reports could be delivered deadpan.

That’s what happened to Andy Tomko. Unable to get him to rise to her bait, Bee called him a chicken. She actually got out of her chair and flapped her arms like a chicken. She clucked like a chicken, too.

“Samantha Bee ... was extremely proficient at what she did,” Tomko said. “In her craft as an actress, she exceeded at it. She was very, very good.”

Stephen Colbert was very, very good, too, said Rick James. Make that RICK JAMES, bee-YOTCH!

Let us explain.

Rick James ran this year for the City Council in Hattiesburg, Miss. This was shortly after another Comedy Central program, “Chappelle’s Show,” rode a wave of popularity on host Dave Chappelle’s lampoon of the ’80s funkmeister Rick James. The result was a cult revival for the outlandish singer and a disco-pounding headache for the candidate.

James, the candidate, was having trouble getting traction, because fans of “Chappelle’s Show” kept stealing his campaign signs. (For the sake of convenience, let us stipulate that from here on we’re talking only about Rick James, the candidate. Rick James, the singer, died last year.)

So James’ wife, Diane, called Comedy Central to ask whether Chappelle might replace the signs, seeing as how his show was indirectly responsible.

No response. But somewhere along the way, the New York Post got wind of her request and put her in its Page Six gossip column. That brought Stephen Colbert and “The Daily Show” to town.

Signs of the times
Rick James, a Democrat, was a serious candidate with a serious platform. He said that although Hattiesburg was rife with corruption, the front-line government workers who would know how to clean things up couldn’t do anything about it because the federal Hatch Act barred them from running for office. (Like himself — he had to take a leave of absence from the state Mental Health Commission to run.)

File/AP Rick James with one of his popular signs.

He came off pretty good in the piece — self-aware, funny and relaxed. You would think that would be a boon for a struggling local candidate. You would be wrong.

“It did not really help my campaign,” he said this week. In fact, “it really hurt me for a local race.”

“The association with Comedy Central kind of turned it into a comedy campaign. People were thinking in terms of the media, the national celebrity, the comedy, the Rick James funk business and everything, and that took away from the issues, which were very serious,” he said.

Worse, he said, was that the story — which was jumped on by the Associated Press, CNN and MTV — only fed the thieves’ hunger for his signs. As an under financed candidate in a local race, he couldn’t afford that.

“I had so many signs stolen [that] I really didn’t have the presence on the street,” James said. “A local race, it has nothing to do with TV. I couldn’t afford billboards, which I really needed because nobody could steal your billboard. Although, if I had had billboards, I don’t have any doubts somebody would have tried to steal that.”

The end result, he said, was that “the same old person got into office.”

Radio silence
James said he never heard back from “The Daily Show” after he lost. Albani, the Comedy Central vice president, said the show was, like the name says, a daily show, and it had to move on quickly without looking back.

Knowing what he knows now, James said, “if I had to do it all over again, I would have run as a Republican.”

Why? “The attention would have helped me, because white Republicans watch Comedy Central.”

(James was joking here. He said he couldn’t countenance the Republican Party.)

Andy Tomko, however, said he’d leap at the chance to do it again, even knowing how badly the show would trivialize his message.

“I was a commodity, and they used it, and no longer having any use for it, I was set aside,” he acknowledged.

But “I think ‘The Daily Show’ serves a purpose, and that purpose is tongue-in-cheek news awareness. It brings a lot of issues to the forefront,” he said. “They are, in my opinion, certainly serving the public well.”

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