I have always suggested that media sensationalism does more harm than good. One of the specific ways that media sensationalism does harm is through lazy higher education reporting. A perfect example of this harmful phenomenon is Paul Farhi's Washington Post article, "Truthinessology: The Stephen Colbert Effect Becomes an Obsession in Academia."
This article is made especially awful by the coincidental fact that Farhi has been vocal elsewhere about the need to give journalists a break when reporting sucks. See, for example, his piece in the American Journalism Review titled "Don't Blame the Journalism."
Well, Mr. Fahri, would I be playing too loosely with semantics if I were to, say, blame the journal-ist?
The first thing: a handful of academic articles that place Stephen Colbert within wider disciplinary contexts like political philosophy, political satire, and media studies, cherry-picked out of literally thousands of academic publications since Colbert first appeared on-air, in no way constitutes an "obsession."
Second, characterizing "the college crowd" as "ivory-tower eggheads" who "devote themselves to studying all things Colbertian" would be tantamount to accusing the Washington Post staff, naturally a bunch of hard-drinking, backroom-dealing, source-inventing, sales-grubbing pencilneck grammarians, of an obsession with Justin Beiber because they occasionally print articles on him.
Thirdly, couching this marginal academic interest in a popular television personality--hardly the first time academics in different disciplines have turned their sights on pop-cultural material--as a broader, tongue-in-cheek argument that our nation's colleges and universities are "in big trouble" is a pretty insipid way of making light of the kind of mobilized anti-intellectualism that really does threaten America's colleges and universities (higher education is one of the few things that America is still the best in the world at doing). And I have no doubt that sentences like "These ivory-town eggheads...they've sliced and diced his [Colbert's] comic stylings more ways than a Ginsu knife" are very much designed to play to the anti-intellectual crowd, and to make academics, even those studying Colbert, to appear silly, useless, and out of touch.
Aside from Farhi's playground-style treatment of academic nerds, the big assumption that underlies the article is perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of it. Fahri, like many, trots out the subject fallacy, the idea that the seriousness of the object of study is equivalent to the seriousness of the study itself.
Fahri mounts himself atop the merry-go-round so all the kids can see him standing tall, and proclaims "look at these eggheads! They're studying Colbert! ColBERT! Stephen COLBERT! But STEPHEN COLBERT is on TV! TEE-VEE! Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuppp."
Yes, because Stephen Colbert is a TV comedian, this infantile fallacy goes, we're supposed to think anyone who takes him seriously in an academic context is obviously, prima facie, either a self-important gasbag or an idiot so dimwitted that s/he fails to understand that this, after all, is just comedy, just entertainment, just a bunch of laughs, and for heaven's sake, why take it so seriously?
Why take it seriously that Colbert's show is expressly built on political satire (which Fahri even goes out of his way to demonstrate in his article)? Why take it seriously that guys like Colbert have performed at events like the White House Correspondents' Dinner (an event dedicated to journalists)? Why take seriously that the Colbert Report, as reported in Fahri's Washington Post, has upwards of 1.6 million viewers, as well as international distribution (maybe the WaPo is also obsessed with Colbert?)?
I have written elsewhere about the way the subject fallacy works day-to-day in our perceptions of people like neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists (people who study the brain must be smart, because the brain is what makes us smart!; people who study evolutionary biology must be experts on everything, because everything is part of our natural evolution!), but others have satirized stereotypes-by-academic-subject, like here.
The problem with these ways of thinking is that, quite obviously to anyone who actually bothers to think about it, there are really smart ways and really dumb ways to study the brain, just as there are really smart ways and really dumb ways to study pop-cultural phenomenon like the Colbert Report. Judging these pursuits by the straightforward perception of their objects of study is just nonsensical.
On the topic of Colbert, we tend to have a discomfort with bringing our entertainment into the classroom, lab, or library, which is understandable in light of the fact that most of us flock to entertainment to catch a break from things like the classroom, lab, or library. But just because something popular is studied, doesn't mean the 'study' of it is just entertainment or passive consumption, nor that we are somehow shallow or wrongheaded to develop more serious interests in things that, after all, are watched, loved, hated, and talked about by millions of people every week. To think something like the Colbert Report insignificant to academic study, so much so that it signals a laughable decline of higher education, is ridiculous. We've long had a "cultural studies" battle over whether to teach the greats or whether to teach Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and if you push me on it I'm leaning well toward the greats. But the question isn't one of mutual exclusion. To dismiss pop-cultural material as unworthy of study for no reason other than its popularity is of course a non-argument; but it's especially stupid because it takes a high level of relevance as a reason for irrelevance, complete nonsense.
