News Satire Roundup: June 25th

Since time get away from me yesterday, I put up Thursday's post earlier today and am adding the News Satire Roundup now.

Sunday, June 25 – Naturally, John opened on the news that the show’s being sued by a coal CEO he took to task last week.  He also broke down Trump’s staggering justification of why he implied he had tapes of his conversations with Comey when he didn’t and cautioned against the “on life support” quips being made about the Senate healthcare bill, since the president is proof that overconfidence in the outcome of a vote doesn’t always pan out.  The main story was on vaccines.  John examined the persisting theories/fears about vaccines, especially the myth that they cause autism, and highlighted the risks that parents put their kids through when they skip or delay vaccines.  More than anything, he talked about the near-impossibility of combating those myths when no amount of scientific evidence will convince some people.  (Apropos of nothing, he also went off on a glorious rant about how stupid fish are – it was fantastic.)

The Daily Show was off this week (and will be next week, too.)  After Trevor’s excellent coverage of the recent Philando Castile verdict, I want to commend the show on the way it addresses police shootings.  Since he took over the show, Trevor has had occasion to do so many of these stories.  In fact, I remember when the shooting of Castile happened last summer, Trevor had to talk about both that and the Alton Sterling shooting in the same story as they’d happened in such close conjunction.  This is a pervasive problem that is occurring around the country, and The Daily Show doesn’t let up in its acknowledgment of how often it tears through another community, devastates another family.

Every time the show has discussed one of these shootings, Trevor has risen to the occasion masterfully.  It’s clear how genuine his grief is for these Black bodies deemed expendable, how acute his consternation is at seeing this injustice play out time and time again across America.  These deaths take a psychic toll on the Black community, and Trevor repeatedly allows his audience to look at the toll it takes on him.  He freely admits his hurt and anger, his honest confusion at how a country can watch tragedies like this occur again and again and still insist that there’s no systemic problem, that it isn’t about race.

I appreciate how much care Trevor takes in bringing new insights to each of these stories.  From out of those feelings of loss, he constantly probes and interrogates these shootings, making new points and examining different angles each time.  The stories on the Castile verdict, the latest in this long line, condemned the NRA for not speaking out against the shooting of a legal gun owner, highlighted the indignity of Castile’s girlfriend still having to call the officer “sir” after he killed her boyfriend (in an attempt to protect her and her daughter’s lives,) and mourned another Black dad forcibly removed from his family in the most brutally-permanent way.  But he’s covered so many other aspects of this issue:  what happens to someone’s perceptions when they only see Black people in the context of crime, a cop responding in kind to “shots fired” (even though it turns out the shots were fired by a fellow officer, not the suspect,) the blithe willingness to dismiss video evidence, the problem of Americans not batting an eye at the phrase “all-Black high school,” and many others.