meadow muffin democrats fear Colbert

I've always been amazed that people talk to him in the first place.

I forget who he had on during his "Better Know Your District" bit the other night but he challenged him to a debate then said "Throwing kittens in a woodchipper. I'm against it." leaving his guest to discuss why it's okay to throw kittens in a woodchipper.

And the guy did it!

Hilarious.

Gotta go along with you on this one, dys.

Unless it's a fake-out by Emmanuel.

The Colbert Report skewers the arrogant conservative viewpoint, you would think the Democrats would be sympathetic to it.

By pretending not to like the show, Emmanuel might be looking to blunt criticism from the right that the show is biased.

Let's face it. Before Jon Stewart got big a couple of years ago and now Colbert, the big things in political broadcasting were The O'Reilly Factor and Rush Limbaugh. Since Stewart and Colbert, those guys have become has-beens and now the hottest thing in political broadcasting are from a liberal viewpoint.

So Emmauel might be playing oh-so-coy and pretending to be shocked at the show-while loving every minute of it.

I saw a show the other night with Stewart and another fellow kind of interviewing each other. Stewart made a very astute comment. "Never fall in love with your audience." He went on to talk about how many will believe he is championing their cause and when he stops, they will complain loudly.

The thing I like about Stewart is that he has no love of either party of political belief. He satirizes current events. Right now Bush is current events and he satirizes him. Very well in fact.

Do not believe for a moment he will not use the same devices he is using now should a democrat come into office in 08.

I wonder if you will hold the same opinion then kelticwizard?

Well, I imagine if that happens, my opinion of Stewart will be similar to my opinion when Dennis Miller switched sides then saw his show cancelled.

Here was my response.



Just because a fellow sees things differently from myself nowadays doesn't mean I abandon him. If he was funny then, chances are he's funny now. Although I didn't find Miller's pro-Perot "rants" masquerading as a standup routine as being funny, he was confusing a campaign speech with political comedy there. I did like his CNBC show, however, even though it got cancelled.

So I'm on record as defending a comedian who turned conservative.

Answer your question, McGentrix?

Dys
I think the fear of Colbert is that the interviews he conducts with members of Congress could be used against them in election campaigns. The Republicans are known to take the silly sound bites out of contex and insert them into their smear campaign ads. (Democrats also do it.)

I think it was stupid to urge them to avoid Colbert. Instead, he might have advised them to be careful how they respond to Colbert's quote demands by being more clever than he is, a difficult task.

BBB

BumbleBeeBoogie:

You raise an interesting point. But here is a question: does the show give permission to use sound bites from the show in political campaigns?

I would think they wouldn't. If the answer is indeed that an interviewee's future opponent cannot use a clip from the show in his commericials, what's the harm?

Well, there's YouTube I suppose,and similar computer sites. But I wonder how much that can hurt, compared with being considered "a regular guy" and taking a little kidding?

Wizard


Wizard, good question, which I've tried to find an answer for. The following doesn't fit exactly, but may offer some clarification. Since the Colbert Report is not a "news program" and may be copyrighted, it's content use may be prohibited in political ads. However, clips from both the Colbert Report and the Daily Show are frequently broadcast on news programs and comedian shows.

BBB

Doc-makers get specific about copyright fair use
Originally published in Current, Nov. 21, 2005
By Steve Behrens

Friday afternoon, things changed for producers who need to use somebody else's footage and music in their documentaries.

Clearing rights may still cost a lot and take too much time, as in the past, but Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi believe producers now have a solid rationale for not paying excessive and confounding fees for copyrighted materials in certain cases.

On Nov. 18 [2005], the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, the Independent Documentary Association, public TV's Independent Television Service and the series P.O.V., and other media groups endorsed a Statement of Best Practices defining four kinds of situations when a producer, under the "fair use" provisions of copyright law, need not pay for a film clip, a shot of a painting or a snatch of music.

Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media at American University in Washington, D.C., and Jaszi, an intellectual property expert at the university's law school, convened groups of experienced filmmakers around the country to look closely at the producers' (and their lawyers') working definition of fair use.

The statement hammered out by producers contains none of the outrage of many Internet-generation consumers who thumb their noses at copyright laws. Documentary makers, after all, want to protect their own work from piracy and immediate devaluation.

Because the statement is based on a fair-use definition consistent with recent court rulings and filmmakers' actual fair-use decisions that weren't challenged by rights owners, it should prove a secure guide for producers, Jaszi said.

Suits over fair use are rare anyway, he said, and almost always decided in favor of producers, but the statement would discourage marginal lawsuits because a judge would routinely determine whether the producer acted reasonably and in good faith within general practice in the field. That's what last week's statement describes.

Michael C. Donaldson, general counsel to the International Documentary Association, copyright textbook author and an advisor to the project, said publishing the statement is a "giant leap" for producers. He hopes it will reintroduce the idea of fair use to program decision-makers and other "nervous folk who want much more [copyright clearance] than the courts require."

"What all these people need is less ambiguity," says Aufderheide. The statement aims to help on that score.
The Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use highlights the most common situations where producers have fair-use rights:

"Employing copyrighted material as object of social, political or cultural critique." Whether the documentary comments directly on the copyrighted material or parodies it, fair use generally applies, the statement says, so long as the producer isn't just taking the opportunity to use much of the material for free.
"Quoting copyrighted works of popular culture to illustrate an argument or point." The producer uses the material for a new purpose, with proper attribution, and doesn't take a free ride on the merits of the original, or use more of it than necessary, or use it simply to avoid the expense of coming up with something else.

"Capturing copyrighted media content in the process of filming something else." The producer unintentionally catches incidental sounds or images, such as pop music playing on the radio in the background or a family singing the copyrighted "Happy Birthday" song. Fair use can't be a cheap way to cop a soundtrack.

"Using copyrighted material in a historical sequence." The producer must show that a certain image, music or speech is crucial to tell a story from history, and there's no suitable substitute and getting permission to use the work is impossible or excessively expensive compared to the doc's budget. However, the producer can't be simply building a doc around the material to exploit it, using more than necessary to make a point, using it without attribution or relying disproportionately on this single source.
[Examples of each of the four categories are posted online by the Center for Social Media.]

Producers could cite fair use in many less common situations and sometimes use more than one of these rationales at once, Jaszi said.

Because fair use is a stranger to some producers, the statement takes pains to argue against common misconceptions. To have fair use, for example, a documentary doesn't have to be exclusively high-minded, unpopular or boring. Indeed, it can be entertaining or even commercially successful, according to the statement.

The statement also says a documentary producer can claim fair use even after trying and failing to negotiate rights. Perhaps it was worthwhile for the producer to try for copyright clearance at an affordable price even if it would be legal to assert fair use.

What's the usual?

Documentary filmmakers work under tighter copyright constraints than academic writers, reporters and artists in many fields, according to Aufderheide and Jaszi.

Historians quote each others' work. Artists reinterpret images created by others. Hard-news journalists routinely use images, footage and music without copyright deals. But filmmakers have been stymied by costs and hassles.

Journalists get away with it simply because they routinely used material without asking, Jaszi says, and their hasty ways became standard for the field.

Film historians once feared the wrath of Hollywood if their articles were illustrated by still images from movies, Jaszi says, but the Society for Cinema and Media Studies harnessed fair use and successfully changed copyright practices on that narrow issue [report in Cinema Journal, 1993]. Last week's fair use statement takes a similar approach with a broader objective.

Too often producers don't employ fair use, omitting material from their programs or paying excessive fees because they or their bosses, program buyers or other gatekeepers are intimidated by copyright holders' overreaching claims, according to Aufderheide and Jaszi. Especially important are the views of insurance companies that sell the errors and omissions policies that producers need.

Getting the E&O insurance carriers to acknowledge a definition of fair use will be crucial, says J. Stephen Sheppard, an advisor to the fair use project and a copyright attorney who represents producers and media companies. Insurance companies understand risk because they're in the business of assessing it, he adds.

Fees are rising and fair use is employed less often than 20 years ago, Jaszi says.

Filmmaker Gordon Quinn said in a report from Aufderheide and Jaszi that rights cost $100,000 more than expected for The New Americans, a PBS series on contemporary immigration, and the series paid a creative toll as well.

"That $100,000 is after we made all kinds of compromises," he said.

John Sorenson, a Washington producer, said at the press conference last week copyright restrictions teach filmmakers to see the world through the rights window. He found it "deadening" to avoid topics unless he knew he could acquire rights without a struggle.

For Aufderheide and Jaszi's project, the next task is to spread word about the statement, persuading nervous producers and their lawyers, public TV and other gatekeepers, and insurers that fair use is safe when used selectively. Some production chiefs still insist that producers clear rights for everything in a film, according to the fair use project.

The Rockefeller Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, which funded the project, will provide additional aid for outreach to these producers and gatekeepers, as well as experimentation with legal clinics at law schools, which can give free advice to filmmakers before and during production, when they need to make rights decisions.

Let's not get greedy

Jay Fialkov, deputy general counsel at WGBH in Boston, deals with producers' fair use questions every week and routinely tutors them on the concept before they start acquiring materials.

In making the American Experience profile of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "Citizen King," WGBH's producers relied on fair use for some of King's materials but recognized the rights of his estate in others, according to Fialkov. There has been no conflict since broadcast, he adds.

When Fialkov trains producers about fair use, he advises them that fair use covers only as much of a copyrighted work as required for their purpose. "Producers might sometimes prefer to keep more of it for entertainment value," he says. "In our view, fair use might not extend so far."

WGBH notably relied on fair use in the 1999 series Culture Shock, including montages of short clips that qualified as commentary, says Fialkov. This fit into the concept of fair use because the series itself commented on trends in the popular arts. Even so, when producers found that extensive footage of Mae West was not available on acceptable terms, they switched the focus of an episode so they could use more material on screen.

Donaldson likewise advises self-restraint, telling clients employing fair use to include only as much copyrighted material in their programs as necessary "and not one second more."

The only producer who has lost a lawsuit over fair use in recent years, Donaldson says, was one with considerable chutzpah who compiled long clips of Elvis Presley performances into a documentary and claimed he did not have to pay for rights.

"That was a good case to lose," says Jaszi.

Licenses too short or narrow

Wider reliance on fair use won't solve every copyright problem that producers face.

Getting permissions from copyright owners is hard enough, and keeping them is harder, because many are unwilling to negotiate prices for long-term rights, fearing that the price of rights will rise.

For years, high copyright costs have prevented broadcast or video sales of both of Henry Hampton's famed Eyes on the Prize civil rights history series. Rights expired for archival footage and other materials. Admirers of the series are working to bring them back into distribution, according to Orlando Bagwell, a producer who worked on the series and is now a grantmaker at the Ford Foundation. [PBS later said the series will come back to TV in fall 2006.]

The 6.5-hour West Virginia history series made for West Virginia Public Broadcasting also was lost for a while but is being rescued.

Re-upping expired broadcast rights fell to the West Virginia Humanities Council, which had inherited ownership of the series from a nonprofit that was set up to produce it, says Craig Lanham, director of TV programming at West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

But broadcast rights don't cover rights for home video or classroom video versions of a program, and educators wanted to get more copies of the state history series after rights for the first 10,000 were gone. Steve Chapman, the state network's purchasing administrator, cleared the video rights, making dozens of deals ?- paying $200 to $300 to show a painting in the series and hundreds of dollars to play a piece of music.

Chapman is now struggling to make deals with a few remaining copyright owners, including three music publishers that don't agree about their split ownership of a single song. Other owners have not replied to his inquiries, requiring the network to delay its video release date three times this year. Now Chapman hopes to publish early in 2006, but he's still waiting for phone calls to be returned.

To hold down the upfront copyright costs of making more videos, the new deal will allow West Virginia Public Broadcasting to pay a separate fee every time it makes 1,000 more copies. Some copyright owners said this could go on forever, but others would sign rights for just seven or eight years, Chapman says.

A major rights problem for WGBH, says Fialkov, is securing rights for new media that are only beginning to develop.

Decades ago, it was enough for public TV to buy broadcast rights, he says. Now he has to wonder whether to nail down cell phone rights, too. When possible, WGBH tries to buy rights for all media in perpetuity, he says, but rights owners fear they'll underestimate what their material will be worth in emerging media.

Fialkov is interested in the new Digital Media Project starting at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, which will look at ways copyright law restricts classroom education as well as the informal education that public TV provides.

William McGeveran, a fellow at Berkman, says the study will explore what policies could serve the interests of both copyright owners and the educators who use their materials.
In recent months McGeveran has followed the progress of the fair use project at American University.

"Peter and Pat have done such a good job starting off by building this statement of best practices ?- not as a wish list but as a reflection of talking to many people out in the field," he said.

BBB:

Well if clips find themselves into Letterman and Leno, then I suppose there is a small risk against the interviewd Congressman.

But this clip thing seems to be only really effective when hammered home by an ad campaign. And if the congressman in question is made to look a little foolish, once, on national TV I don't think it hurts that much.

Especially when the Democrats consider how much good The Daily Show and Colbert do lampooning conservatives.

If a Democratic Congressman looks silly for three seconds on Leno, but the right wing looks silly for an hour on The Daily Show and Colbert, that is a tradeoff I would take in a minute.

Just found out on the news a couple of hours ago: the Republicans told their people to keep away from Colbert since his unpopular, (with them), speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

So both are saying keep away. But Colbert is booked with political figures from both sides through the summer.

I say, "Lambast 'em all, until we get some honesty in there."

Both Stewart and Colbert attempt to satirize and lampoon politicos from both parties. The difference is that Stewart is funny and Colbert isn't.

No...they're both very funny.

And others are right, they have been increasing their attacks on democrats in congress since January. I'm pretty liberal and I enjoy the attacks directed at either side of the political party. There criticism is funny, honest, and fair regardless of who they are attacking.

I don't think Stewart will "switch sides" in a way comparable to Miller-- he'll always be liberal, but he'll joke about whoever's in power no matter which party that happens to be. Just like the other night when he skewered both Hillary and Obama for their silly accent stunts. *ouch*

In my opinion, Colbert is the funniest thing on Television right now.

Then you dont watch much TV,do you?

Letterman is still getting mileage out of Bill Clinton jokes. I always try to catch Stewart but sometimes I'm not in the mood for Colbert. I think his put on pretentious bit can get tiresome, but then again, everytime I watch I laugh till my sides ache. When he does his "know a district" bits, I always wonder why the elected official doesn't know what he/she is getting into beforehand. He interviewed a local county rep from my district and I was crying by the time he finished. By the way my local rep was considered to be pretty liberal and had been in office for over 30 years. The issues were silly and no one got hurt, not politically at least. Anybody remember the time he interviewed Barney Frank and followed him around the Capital. That was funny, but not to Barney.

I totally understand Emmanuel's advice.

I mean, it's Stewart's and Colbert's job to satirise, and they do it in a way that pleases their viewers. They should never stop.

But of course, there's no obligation for politicians to willingly offer themselves up for ridicule. Why should they? There's little to win, and enough risk.

If I were a politician, I would have no problem with them mocking me. But I wouldnt voluntarily throw myself in there to be mocked some extra.

When it comes to critical interviews, I really believe that political culture has gone all wrong, esp in the UK/US, in that the more prominent politicians, Bush way out front, just make sure they wont have to face more critical questions than the absolute miminum they can get.

I think it's a democratic obligation for elected representatives to be available for critical questioning.

But to make themseles available to be made a joke of, in a comedy show? Whyever would they?

Meantime, Colbert and Stewart can do just fine with tapes and quotes and imitations and the whole arsenal they can otherwise use to make fun of current affairs.

Btw, from what I caught through web video, I used to think Stewart was pretty funny, and Colbert just kinda wasnt. But the other night I watched a bunch of clips from both on the Comedy Central website, and I thought the opposite.

Colbert had become sharper, and had remained fairly sardonic, while Stewart appeared to be slipping into that more lazy, low-tempo self-congratulatory style that makes Letterman and Leno so unfunny to a European like me.

(If you cant imagine what would make Letterman and Leno so unfunny to a European like me, read this post :wink: )

Colbert Wins "Person of the Year" Award
US comedian Stephen Colbert has been named "Person of the Year" by the US Comedy Arts Festival late last week. On accepting the award, Colbert said: "What an honor. An honor to receive and an honor for you to give to me."