• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 22, 2008

The March issue of MEDIA magazine marks the third year in which we have selected a Person of the Year, and at first glance, Stephen Colbert might seem an odd choice. In truth, we thought long and hard before settling on Colbert. In the past we chose people - iGod Steve Jobs in 2006, and inconvenient-truth teller Al Gore in 2007 - whom we believed had the greatest overall impact on the world of media during the preceding 12 months. 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.

Take a recent episode in which Colbert lambasted the apparent lunacy of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul by highlighting an outtake from a recent debate in which Paul rationally challenged the moral, ethical and strategic missteps that led the U.S. into the war in Iraq. To illustrate the logic of Paul's comments, Colbert dredged up ancient, "archival" footage of similar Paul rants, such as whether the world was indeed flat. Paul, incidentally, was also a runner-up for Media's Person of the Year, if for no better reason than how he utilized the Internet for a grassroots campaign that offset the traditional media clout of his GOP rivals. Paul may have been an also-ran among mainstream journalists, in the polls and primaries, but he has consistently been No. 1 in Google's search index, indicating there is a profound curiosity about the candidate that isn't being met by the general media.

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. Even in their distant analog past, media have always been poor proxies for real life, but there has been a clear progression toward the blurrier side, and no one straddles that line better that Stephen Colbert. When he turns to Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly and zings, "If you're an act, what am I?" it makes us all pause to reflect on the substance of who we are.

Like many of the issues we address in this magazine, we're not entirely sure what the implications of this are for people in the media business, but we do think it is one worth dwelling on. 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. So help me iGod.

JOE MANDESE

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF