Now you could study Shakespeare and be quite elite.
And you can charm the critics and have nothin’ to eat.
Just slip on a banana peel, the world’s at your feet.
Make ‘em laugh,
Make ‘em laugh,
Make ‘em laugh!

- Donald O’Connor, Make ‘Em Laugh (From “Singin’ In The Rain” - Lyrics by Arthur Freed)

§ § §

There’s a little something special happening in TV news.  It’s been creeping into the living rooms through the mailslots and in between commercials.  It’s been happening late at night (mostly), but also sometimes during primetime.  You might call it ‘media insurgency’.

Former CBS anchorman Dan Rather, during a press conference a number of weeks back, kept other reporters in stitches with his ‘take’ on stories he experienced in his latter days at the helm of the News division of the ‘Tiffany Network’.

Charles Gibson, now the ABC anchor, revisited the set of ‘Good Morning America’ around the same time and did some schtick with the new guys.

We had ‘NBC Nightly News’ anchor Brian Williams appearing on Saturday Night Live’s ‘Weekend Update’ a few Saturday’s ago to resounding cheers and guffaws.

Fox News is reportedly creating a conservative version of ‘The Daily Show’ to begin airing early in the new year.

We have Robin Williams’ new movie, ‘Man Of The Year’, about a Jon Stewart-like TV host who becomes President.

All of this, and the new ‘Al Jazeera English’ channel that launched last week did so with a joke:

Two journalists don’t walk into a bar. They can’t. We don’t have any. We’re a Muslim country! Bwa ha ha!

Methinks the Jon Stewart effect is in play right across the board here.

The days of Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith, Frank Reynolds and Huntley and Brinkley may be gone, but even Walter Cronkite, at this year’s RTNDA bun toss, was apparently channeling Bob Hope during a speech!

Add Keith Olbermann, Joe Scarborough and yes, even CNN’s right-wing wacko Glenn Beck to the mix, and isn’t it just the teensiest bit possible that all these guys and their immediate bosses are a tad jealous of the attention Stewart and Colbert (and other ‘fake’ news shows) are getting? Perhaps they’re finally latching on to the fact that while the primo demographic for television news is 25-54 (male-female), there’s a significant hunk of that demo — the 18 to 25 group — that gets a significant hunk of their news from the likes of Stewart and Colbert.

Maybe they’re also realizing that ‘fake’ news, ain’t.  There was nothing ‘fake’ about Jon Stewart having Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf on his show and asking him pointblank — first question — “Where’s Osama bin Laden?”  Brian Williams would have killed for that interview and to have been the first to ask the question.  Was Jon going for the laugh?  Of course - he’s a comedian.  But that little interview was on every news program on every channel the next day and all over the Internet.

There are so many other examples of the shift — a paradigm shift that’s taken almost 6 years since Gore conceded defeat — which makes me think we’re in for a new form of ‘reportage’, indeed are experiencing it now.  It won’t surprise me to see classes in stand-up comedy being given as electives at the Columbia School of Journalism, Ryerson, UBC and other institutions that insist they’re grooming the journalists of tomorrow.

They’re wrong, of course.  The journalists of tomorrow are already here, and online.

In the last month alone we’ve seen one woman blogger hand her blog over to her sister in college (yes, she’s taking journalism and political science), while she takes up an editorial position at ‘Vanity Fair’.  Local TV stations all across America (not so much in Canada) have added local blog comments to their nightly newscast, and increasingly link those and other blogs to their own station website, something that would have been unheard of even a year ago.

Cable news nets were the first, and remain the leaders in using online sources in the pursuit of reportage.  And like it or not, in a recent poll of print and television journalists in the United States, when they were asked what their web homepage was, more than 70% said, The Drudge Report.  It’s still the single largest aggregator of news sources in the world, updated 24/7.  Don’t forget, most of the sources on Drudge have their material re-written specifically for web consumption.

We already have Al Gore using the Internet (he did create it after all!) and a feature film documentary to keep his face and opinions in the public eye through non-traditional means, and make no mistake about it, he IS a celebrity.  We have an Oprah Winfrey fan who has begun a website — a very popular website as it turns out — pushing the Oprah ‘08 mantra.  Fans of George Clooney have printed and distributed 50,000 ‘George Clooney for President’ t-shirts… and they’re serious.

Anyone who believes that A-list Hollywood celebrities, or primetime performers, whether they be journalists or stand-up comedians, can’t or won’t run for office, and succeed, need look no further than one guy who made three movies with a monkey and a guy who played the Iceman in a Batman movie: Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The way people vote, the way governments are formed, how they rule and how they’re interpreted by the media has all changed.

Mark my words, if SNL or The Daily Show or The Colbert Report decide to allow a presidential hopeful two minutes to get their platform across, and the equal access law is invoked, producer Lorne Michaels (a former stand-up comedian himself) will be more than happy to trot them through 30 Rock one at a time.  The world will watch, the press will rehash, and one of them will become the next President of the United States - maybe because of something they said on Saturday Night Live.  And there won’t be a laugh track.

Maybe “Wag The Dog” was a documentary!