News Satire Roundup: April 9th-April 13th

Sunday, April 9 – Great opening story on the air strike in Syria.  John acknowledged the extreme no-easy-answers-ness of the situation but also brilliantly laid out the many factors Trump likely didn’t give any serious consideration to before taking such a strong action fraught with potential fallout.  The observation that a man who runs on praise just got a lot of it for bombing someone was chilling.  The show also discussed Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment allegations, in which we were subjected to the horror that is Bill O’Reilly narrating a sex scene from a book he wrote – there’s not enough “ewww” to cover it.  The main story looked at gerrymandering and the epic ways it skews elections.  It seems crazy that there are hardly any rules in place to guard against it, or that redrawing district lines falls into the hands of elected representatives at all.  What gives, Congress?

Monday, April 10 – I like Roy, but his “best of” special was a little uneven for me.  I thought it started and ended strong (with his piece on Black journalists putting up with racism on cable news and his amazing Trump-quote rap,) but the clips in the middle weren’t quite as good.  There was his “peak Blackness” piece after Moonlight won Best Picture, the suggestion to get funding for Meals on Wheels by militarizing it, showing off the stupidity of HB2 by setting up a fake food truck in North Carolina and refusing to serve randomly-declared gay people (a tag team with Jordan,) and the field report about Texas anti-gun folks protesting campus open carry laws by carrying around dildos.  I dunno – a lot of it was good, but it wasn’t great, and I know Roy has better stories than some of the ones included.  Maybe his strongest stories tend to be race-related and they were going for more variety?

Tuesday, April 11 – If you told me a year ago that I’d be excited for a “best of” special from Ronny, I wouldn’t have believed it.  But Ronny is hands-down my pick for most improved correspondent, and while I think the show could’ve swapped out a couple of these stories for better ones, it was well-done overall.  They covered his epic takedown of Fox News’s racist Chinatown piece (still my favorite story of his,) a field report about Christian/Jewish/Muslim cooperation in Omaha, a piece on the whole “Trump will be great for the economy” idea, a bit on a minor clash between Lunar New Year and Black History Month, and one of his recent tech pieces about the proliferation of smart devices.  Good stuff, but I would’ve thrown in the one about the Australian getting back by a crocodile (probably bumping the Tri-Faith initiative one, because I still don’t like the stuff with the imam – I know it’s satire, but I didn’t like it.)

Wednesday, April 12 – Pretty good, well-rounded special for Desi, although I think they really should’ve included her field piece at the NRA convention – that’s one of my favorites of hers.  Instead, they covered her interview with the creepy and ultra-rich “Trumpettes,” a story on a Clinton supporter who ran a business selling misogynistic political T-shirts, a catch-all “What the Actual Fact” segment that covered several different occasions (it seems to hearken back to the “old days” to be talking about Ted Cruz in a debate – wow,) a response to (again) Cruz’s remark about “New York values,” and a piece about the surge in women making appointments to get IUDs after the election.  While I don’t know if this was Desi’s absolute best, there weren’t any real misses in here, so it might come out as the most consistently-good of the specials for me – not too shabby.

Thursday, April 13 – Hasan is my favorite correspondent, and my only complaint here is that I wanted more.  For his special, they kept it to one story per segment, showing all or most of the story rather than trimming it down to fit in an extra piece or two (although the first was from a two-parter that they condensed to fit one segment.)  So, we got US hysteria over Syrian refugees in Canada (featuring Hasan’s interview with Justin Trudeau,) the US women’s soccer team’s pay disputes, a fact rundown of Trump’s first Muslim ban (featuring the immortal line, “Waterboard that puppy!”,) and his raw, shell-shocked reaction to Trump’s election.  Like I said, there are so many more excellent pieces they could’ve gone with – his response to Trump’s original call for a Muslim ban, his field piece on the “ban the box” movement, one of his Mad Money-esque segments, his visit to the RNC – but all the stories they did include were great.