News Satire Roundup: September 25th-September 29th

Sunday, September 25 – Yay, we’re back!!  First up was the protests in Charlotte, with pride of place going to some horrifically ignorant/tactless comments from a North Carolina representative – just gross.  John touched on the Wells Fargo debacle, insulting an 8-year-old Ron Howard (in The Music Man) and pointing out that a customer Wells Fargo scammed ten times would have been better off taking his money to any other bank, including Elizabeth Banks.  The main story was on scandals involving Clinton and Trump.  The goal was to sift through what’s true and what’s hyperbole, recognizing the false equivalency that tends to be put forth between them.  I feel I learned a lot about the nitty-gritty of Clinton’s emails and foundation, and the no-contest comparison to Trump was of course obvious.  John’s analogy comparing political scandals to raisins in cookies (with a colossal downpour of raisins representing Trump) was great.

Monday, September 26 – Live show following the debate.  The first general-reaction segment had some great bits in it.  I especially liked Trevor’s riff on “truth Trump,” in which Trump lets a tiny bit of truth slip out by mistake, as well as his disgust over Trump touting not paying federal income tax as proof of why he’s qualified to be president(?)  Roy had a slight disagreement with Trevor over the difference between fact-checking and Black-checking, and then Jordan was up, talking to a professional fact-checker about Trump and Clinton – I laughed at his assertion that, from a fact-checking perspective, Trump is a bore because he’s so blatantly easy to refute.  Alicia Menendez, a writer for Fusion, was the guest, and she and Trevor discussed where the chips seemed to have fallen by the debate’s end.  Interesting point about how both sides are so firmly entrenched that everyone thinks it’s obvious that “their” candidate won.

Tuesday, September 27 – The continued debate coverage featured the post-debate “spin” show, in which Trump himself joined his surrogates in trying to paint the night in his favor (or, barring that, trying to prove how it was rigged against him.)  I liked Trump’s contradictory complaints about his microphone, because it led to a really fun Darth Vader bit from Trevor.  Desi came in for a What the Actual Fact entirely composed of Trump interrupting Clinton to claim he never said things she accuses him of saying, when the original quotes are of course ludicrously easy to find.  I don’t understand the point of saying “I never said that” in an age when your video recordings/tweets never go away.  What’s the idea – if you refute it long enough, you can make it less true?  The guest, author Sara Goldrick-Rab, discussed college tuition/debt, speaking on the dire straits in which many students find themselves and her ideas on how to ease that burden.

Wednesday, September 28 – After a quick bit on the Taliban’s opinion of the first debate, Trevor dug more into Clinton’s charge about Trump’s body-shaming/remarks comments about a former Miss Universe.  Thesis?  Trump is gross, seriously.  This led into a larger story about Trump’s views on/derogatory comments about women.  I really liked what Trevor said about how Trump conducts himself as if the world is a beauty contest in which every woman is competing whether they want to or not.  It gets at the fact that, for Trump, degrading women is basically pathological, like he honestly can’t see them in any way that isn’t about their perceived sex appeal.  Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linked In, was the guest.  He talked, not about his company, but about why it was so important for him to use his wealth and position to speak out against Trump (complete with a Trump-mocking card game he made and manufactured!)

Thursday, September 29 – First up was the governor of Maine’s racist “binder o’ Maine drug dealers” scrapbook that he alleged was 90+% Black or Latino (grossly innacurate, of course.)  Next, Trevor took a close look at stop-and-frisk in New York, featuring disturbing videos of citizens stopped/shoved around by police, and harrowing statistics of the practice’s racial bias (87% of stopped citizens were Black or Latin@) and overall inefficacy (700,000 stops in a year, and 88% found nothing.)  Roy and Jordan tag-teamed a field piece testing North Carolina’s HB2 law that allows businesses to discriminate against anyone they perceive as being LGBTQ, refusing service to random customers at a mocked-up food truck.  In doing so, they highlighted the insane fact that what they were doing was totally legal.  Blood Orange was the musical guest – all that really caught my attention was that he appeared to be half-wearing a lab coat(?)