I'm not a huge fan of the Colbert Report, but last night I was waiting to take my next dose of cough medicine and watched part of an episode. I probably would have changed the channel, but Colbert was doing a story on how herpes was being spread quickly on college campuses due to the prevalence of playing beer pong. Colbert's "report" was actually not about herpes or beer pong, but really about how the whole story was a college newspaper joke that got picked up and spread by the national media (aka primarily Fox News). Here is Colbert's take...
I'm always a sucker for ways of using pop culture to "teach" source evaluation, but I'm also really interested in the ways that some stories get spread while others don't. One blogger who talked about the spread of the article notes that it is probably the combination of adolescent, sexuality, and alcohol. He correctly points out that these three things are included in many urban legends, but are also strong enough social concerns that can lead people to miss the urban legend in badly written satire.
Sadly, Fox News won't allow me to embedded their original newscast, but thanks to the miracle of Youtube, here's their story. My favorite part of this is that they offer tips for "safe beer pong" while on Spring Break.
In addition to being a much funnier and more current example of evaluating sources,* I really like it as an example of the anxiety we have over adolescent sexuality, specifically as it relates to travel. You'll note that Fox News seems to be working under the assumption that beer pong is something that only happens in the tropical, debauchedness of Cancun or Daytona Beach. This story is in fact not much different than the numerous warning of violence linked to drugs and prostitution threatening Spring Breakers in Mexico. The original State Department advisory warns primarily of drug related violence, although when discussed by the media this story generally takes an advisory against frequenting areas of known for prostitution and morphs it into a warning about females being sold into prostitution.
I'm really intrigued with the ways that both the beer pong and Mexico warnings place risky adolescent behavior in remote locations and use the "holiday" to talk about taboos that are clearly issues the other 51 weeks out of year. I write a lot about how these taboos are so strong that they often have to be dealt with in the adolescent road trip novel in order to physically, geographically, and emotionally distance the behavior from adolescence, but I find it even more interesting that this pattern seems to becoming common for the media as well.
*My previous example is a series of stories about Al Gore inventing the internet and the ways that narrative was spread and expanded by "reputable" sources. Sadly, for most of my composition students, this example is too dated for it to be funny.
1 comment:
This is wonderful.
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