Janelle is Secretly a Writer for The Colbert Report

For a while before taking this class I'd been a bit cynical about the various sources of manipulation in my life.  It’s been fun to talk and think about this more throughout the semester, especially with respect to literature, which I haven’t thought about before.  I found myself worrying a little about all the manipulation, but found comfort in the realization that the best and perhaps only way to rise above the manipulation is simply to acknowledge it.

I remember one of the first days of class we talked about which news sources we thought were most unbiased.  Most people would tend to think CNN is probably the most unbiased, reliable source, and would discount The Colbert Report and The Daily Show as merely comedy sketches.  However, I think it’s pretty impossible for something to be entirely unbiased.  The bias in CNN reporting could be so subtle we can’t even perceive it, which means we are unknowingly being tricked into agreeing with them.  Colbert and Stewart present bias that is so obvious, so transparent, that, in a way, we can see the issues for what they really are.  The bias is so easy to peel away with these shows, making them perhaps a better way than CNN to react to the news in your own way, without being influenced by the way in which it is presented.  Once you know you are being tricked, you can see the situation more clearly.

I think this class, in a way, operates much like the Colbert Report, with my other classes being more CNN or NPR-esque.  It was so blatantly stated from the first day of class that we would be manipulated, but also that it was exactly the point of the class.  Much as the Colbert Report challenges viewers not to trust traditional media, this class encouraged us – through the transparent manipulation in this class – to examine the ways in which we are manipulated by other authority figures in our lives.