Gone are the days where established news outlets are more trusted as viable sources of political news than the stand-in news segments made for television comedies. Studies spearheaded by Ohio State University show that viewers now prefer satirical news over serious, straight-to-the facts news. But, at least one contentious comedy series is now receiving its due controversy.
“Who is America?,” the brainchild of English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, premiered on July 15th to a slew of dissenting voices on both sides of the political spectrum.
Prior to the pilot episode on Showtime, current and former politicians such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., former Gov. Sarah Palin, R-Alaska, Judge Roy Moore, R-Ala., and former Vice President Dick Cheney realized that they were “duped” by Cohen into making statements that were inconsistent with their true opinions.
However, despite the inclusion of some prominent liberal voices in addition to the majority conservative guests, the show’s aim was evidently to ridicule conservative opinions with only a semblance of balance.
The first episode revolves around a proposal by one of Cohen’s phony personas, Israeli Col. Erran Morad, to arm kindergartners through a fake program called “Kinder Guardians.”
Col. Morad supposedly finds sympathy among supporters of gun rights such as Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, before securing “approval” from members of Congress such as Reps. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., and Joe Wilson, R-S.C., and former Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill. The idea seems to be that these esteemed, prudent leaders in our society willfully stated their endorsement and thus exposed some radical deviance inherent to their political beliefs.
As compelling as it seems to the rising number of millennials that solely resort to satirical news for the facts, the recent backlash from the “guests” that has surfaced now exhibits the ruse.
Walsh recently appeared on CNN to detail how Cohen’s persona as “Erran Morad” went far beyond being an arbitrary Israeli personality. Walsh was reportedly being offered a television award for being a “great friend of Israel” and was flown to D.C. with luxurious accommodations. For the acceptance speech of the award, Cohen had concocted an entire story about an Israeli boy fending off an attacker at a school for Walsh to read. In a small segment of that speech, Walsh did indeed read off a teleprompter the now-aired support of the “Kinder Guardians” program. However, in trying to rebuke his support, he was faced with breaking the diplomatic courtesy he was supposedly being honored for. Walsh even admitted that “alarms started to go off” while he said that sentence for the show.
“They use psychological manipulation as well as lies and tricks to put their victim into comedic situations that subject them to public shame, embarrassment, and ridicule. I believe the intent is to destroy reputations and even lives,” Van Cleave, another unwitting guest on the show, concluded in his publicly released analysis of Cohen’s deception.
Cohen’s methods of ridiculing conservatives has also been outlined as extreme. Cohen’s interview with Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, especially drew criticism for how Cohen transitioned the arming conversation to women.
“Women need a gun,” Cohen says in his character. “My wife, she have a gun, and she shot me once. I mean, what can I do? I get horny in the middle of the night. But it’s not rape if it’s your wife.”
The remark was reportedly intended to mirror a prior remark by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen about spousal rape to a reporter at the Daily Beast back in 2015.
Cohen then patted Pratt, who said, “That probably won’t be on the video we send to the hill.”
The remark further inflamed the prior criticism of the show’s writing staff, including Kurt Metzger, a disgraced comedian on Comedy Central’s “Inside Amy Schumer” who was notoriously involved in an online harassment campaign in 2016. Many viewers, justifiably encouraged by the featured politicians, planned to boycott the show or Showtime itself on account of Cohen’s remarks. Only about 327,000 people did actually tune in when the clock struck 10 for the vaunted show premiere that promised a spoof with Bernie Sanders and the “Kinder Guardians” saga.
Cohen’s terribly misguided objective may as well be to showcase and possibly remediate America’s political polarization in order to answer the show’s titular question: Who Is America? However, Cohen’s rash methods of misrepresenting political standpoints in extremes such as support for the “Kinder Guardians” only deepens that same divide and uses comedy to shroud the gravity of valid political debates.
