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Since Stephen Colbert delivered his amazing smackdown of Bush and the right wing just over a week ago at the White House Correspondents’ Dinnner ["So Not Funny," op-ed, May 4], he’s been the talk of not just the progressive blogosphere – but the nation as well. Reaction to Colbert and the dinner has become a massive senation and huge number of people are searching Yahoo and Google to find the video, transcript, or read coverage of the event. Ratings for The Colbert Report soared 37% last week in the aftermath of the event. (Has a C-SPAN broadcast ever been so entertaining?)
His performance reminds me of the adage about the professional lady who complains about bedbugs in a brothel.

According to CNET’s News.com site, Colbert became “one of the Internet’s hottest acts” after video of his performance spread across the Internet. Within three days of the event, clips of the speech had climbed to the #1, #2, and #3 spots atop YouTube’s “Most Viewed” video list. Before YouTube took down the video, the various clips of Colbert’s speech had been viewed 2.7 million times in less than 48 hours.

On Wednesday, C-Span, the nonprofit network that first showed Mr. Colbert???s speech, asked two Web sites, YouTube.com and IFILM.com, to pull clips of Stephen Colbert’s April 29 performance at the White House Correspondents Association dinner from their Web sites. Both sites complied with the request. C-SPAN said it contacted the companies because the copyrighted material was posted online without its permission.
???We have had other hot ??? I hate to use that word ??? videos that generated a lot of buzz,??? said Rob Kennedy, executive vice president of C-Span, which was founded in 1979. ???But this is the first time it has occurred since the advent of the video clipping sites.???

YouTube posted the Colbert video shortly after the dinner ended and received the letter to remove it May 3, according to Julie Supan, YouTube senior director of marketing. After removing the video, YouTube received a large number of e-mails asking about the missing clip, Supan said. A misconception that C-SPAN is funded by the government led viewers to complain that the Colbert video should be in the public domain, Supan said. Meanwhile IFILM declined to comment.
The Colbert video is still available through a C-SPAN agreement with Google Video.

WomenDiary Note : Stephen’s performance may not have been liked by the Washington press corps, but the savvy host of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report knew exactly who he was playing to: the millions of unhappy Americans at home who are sick of the Bush administration getting a free pass for so long. That’s the power of the democratic Internet.