News Satire Roundup: August 21st

August 21 – First up was Ryan Lochte’s scandal in Rio and fall from grace as America’s favorite “sweet dumb merman.”  From there, it was straight to the main story on charter schools and their wildly-inconsistent regulation from state to state.  Plenty of gory facts, like a school that reported attendance numbers at 1500% of reality to get more tax dollars, or schools that unexpectedly closed less than two months in.  I appreciated John’s point that this sort of bad business risks so much more because it can ruin a kid’s future.  Last was a direct appeal to Trump that, with two bad options of losing to Clinton or actually being president, Trump should take option 3:  drop out and claim it was all a scathing satire of the U.S. political system.  As a template, he used the children’s chapter book The Kid Who Ran for President (full of startling parallels) and offered Trump that kid’s campaign suspension speech to use as his own.

Since there was no Daily Show this week, let’s have a quick shout-out to the correspondents.  By and large, I think the folks supporting Trevor do a bang-up job, bringing the funny and the truth bombs in equal turn.

Far and away, Hasan is my favorite.  His pieces dealing with Islamaphobia are always sharply funny and really incisive – I loved his initial reaction to Trump’s Muslim ban, and his recent field report talking to Trump supporters at the RNC convention was just incredible.  I also really love Jessica (sigh – so long, Jess!) and Roy.  Favorites of theirs include Jessica’s pieces on Beyoncé’s Superbowl performance and remarks made about women who support Clinton vs. Sanders, and Roy’s discussions with Trevor on #OscarsSoWhite and Jesse Williams’s BET Awards speech.  While I always enjoy Desi’s What the Actual Fact pieces, I like the rare occasions when we see her doing something different; her field report at the NRA convention was great.  I had a hard time with Ronny at first, but lately, I think he’s really started finding his voice on the show.  The Olympics bit he tagteamed with Roy was easily the funniest of those segments.

I understand complaints that Jordan, though entertaining, is overused on the show, and to an extent, I agree.  However, I think part of that is the interesting fact that he’s really the only major correspondent who’s a white male – Lewis is an infrequent contributor, and Adam’s appearances have been limited thus far (plus, when his ethnicity factors into his pieces, it’s usually from a Jewish perspective.)  So, if the show needs a douchey specimen of white male privilege, Jordan’s the one they need to play that, and since we wouldn’t that to be the only thing we see from him (just like, while Hasan, Michelle, and Roy report about Muslim, women’s, and Black issues, none of them reports exclusively about those topics,) we see him in other stories as well.  So yeah, I think there’s some overexposure, but I also think it’s interesting that it results in part from his position as the “token white man.”

Finally, I enjoy the practice of casual gender and racebending in the short sketches the correspondents perform about various news blurbs.   I like that it just is.  Yes, Roy is their go-to Trump, and he’s Black, but he’s not playing up any sort of “Black Trump” angle, any more than Desi mined her gender for humor when she played Merrick Garland.  It’s just an efficient way to do these skits without having to rely on Jordan or Adam for virtually every one.