You might have seen this amazing exchange between CBS Late Night host Stephen Colbert and CNN’s Kaitlyn Collins on Monday night.
Colbert: I know you guys are objective over there, that you just report the news as it is.
[loud audience laughter]
Collins: Was that supposed to be a laugh line?
Colbert: It wasn't supposed to be but I guess it is.
What was so amazing about it wasn’t that everybody laughed. After all, just 32% of the public trusts the media to be objective. What was amazing was that Colbert really appears to believe that CNN is objective.
On the one hand, we shouldn’t be surprised by this. Both Colbert and CNN are anti-Trump and liberal. It’s natural that Colbert would agree with CNN’s point of view.
But does Colbert really believe that the public views CNN as “objective”? After all, just 7 percent of the public told Gallup last year that they have a “great deal of trust in the media,” while 38% say they have no trust at all.
And yet Colbert not only thinks CNN is objective, he must have thought that his audience would agree with him. Witness how surprised he was and the discomfort it caused him, which led him to quickly change the subject.
The audience’s laughter clearly rattled Colbert, who is, whatever you think of his politics, easily one of the most gifted improvisers in the world. The laughter may have provoked in him a kind of cognitive dissonance, which is the anxiety of discovering that reality was quite different from how you imagined it.
