NYT, NYP followup on Colbert

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on May 9th, 2006

It worked. UPI, in a short item entitled “Colbert controversy delivers ratings” reports:

The New York Post said the routine– and the online controversy about whether it was appropriate to insult President George W. Bush to his face– resulted in the best ratings week ever for Colbert’s talk show.

The Colbert Report averaged just under 1.5 million total viewers for its four episodes last week — an increase of 37 percent over the show’s year-to-date average through April 30, the newspaper reported.

Sumner Redstone is smiling!

And, in yesterday’s Studio Briefing on the groovy site MovieWeb, is this item, entitled “VIDEO SITE YOUTUBE UPSET OVER C-SPAN DEAL WITH GOOGLE VIDEO”:

The video site YouTube.com has expressed consternation over C-Span’s demand that it remove its video of Stephen Colbert’s remarks at the White House Correspondents Dinner last month and the cable channel’s subsequent decision to make the same video available to YouTube’s rival, Google Videos. In an interview with today’s (Monday) New York Times, YouTube marketing director Julie Supan, noting that the Colbert performance had been viewed 2.7 million times in less than 48 hours, commented, “This was an exciting moment for them in a viral, random way. … To take it down from one site and uploading on another, it is perplexing.” The Times observed that C-Span’s Google deal requires that not only the Colbert speech be included in the download, but also other speeches, including a routine by President Bush and a Bush impersonator.

Ms. Supan is, of course, being disingenuous. But at least she’s characterizing it as “perplexing,” and not sinister– like the hair-on-fire conspiracy geeks alluded to in the original NYT item:

…there were rumblings on left-wing sites that someone was trying to silence a man who dared to speak truth to power.

But as became clear later in the week, this was a business decision, not a political one. Not only is the entire event available to be streamed at C-Span’s Web site, c-span.org, but the network is selling DVD’s of the event for $24.95, including speeches and a comedy routine by President Bush with a President Bush imitator.

Whose name would be Steve Bridges. (More on him here.)

And, if you just can’t get enough of this story, check out the back and forth that took place in our comments on an earlier posting.

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