Stephen Colbert is Media Magazine's Person of the Year
Why?
This year, we are picking Colbert for what he symbolizes: The pseudo nature of modern media's mash-up, faux culture, and perhaps more significantly, how it shapes our actual culture.
We're not saying Colbert hasn't had a tangible impact. It's just that it has been in a subtler way than that of our other leading poy candidates - power shifters like Rupert Murdoch, Facebook dweeb-in-chief Mark Zuckerberg, or the Googleplextuplets of Brin, Page and Schmidt - who moved big pieces around the media chessboard. Instead, Colbert moved us. He moved us to laugh. And he moved us to think. And in so doing, succeeded where countless other political satirists failed. And he did it during what arguably has been a time in which potent political poking was needed more than ever. He did it by playing the part so well that it has often been difficult to know exactly which side he is poking.
Finally ...
Politics aside, we picked Colbert because of how he symbolizes the way modern media blurs the line between art and life, fact and fiction, and our real and virtual worlds. The Colbert Nation has even come up with a word to define this movement - truthiness - which seems an incredibly apt way of describing the murky state of our information society.
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In the end, Colbert is nothing more than an entertainer - an arch political satirist who makes us think, makes us laugh, and with a heavy dose of irony, helps us to feel proud to be Americans. And that's the truthiness, the whole truthiness, and nothing but the truthiness.
