How Does Sacha Baron Cohen Get Away With It?

So Sacha Baron Cohen is up to his old tricks again.  After having achieved notoriety as Ali G, the fake interviewer with the funny accent who duped former Secretary of State James Baker and others into answering silly questions, Baron Cohen went on to even greater fame as Borat, a fake documentarian from Kazakhstan.

The Baron Cohen shtick is to make politicians and ordinary people look ridiculous by tricking them into interviews under false pretenses and then engaging them in an increasingly absurd line of questioning until they figure out they’ve been had.  This is supposed to reveal something profound about the purported absurdity of the American experience.

This is hardly an original approach to comedy or social commentary.  Half of the content on“The Daily Show” consists of mocking interviews with some poor rube who doesn’t watch “Comedy Central” and doesn’t know better than to engage with its “correspondents.”

But my purpose today is not to critique Baron Cohen’s new Showtime series “Who Is America?,” which I probably won’t be watching anyway, but to wonder how it is that 14 years after “Da Ali G Show,” people still fall for his tricks?

I have a professional interest in this question. Having worked in public relations for a long time, I’d like to think that no client of mine would even be interviewed by a disguised Sacha Baron Cohen.  It is the job of a PR handler to vet the interviewer well before anyone agrees to talk in front of a camera.  You do this by talking with his or her producer, then verifying everything they’ve told you via Google searches and databases like Cision and Gorkana.  Best practices would then call for the PR team to produce a briefing memo with the bio of the interviewer, some suggested themes, and maybe even some potential questions.

It’s fair to say that none of these procedures were followed before Baron Cohen’s victims agreed to be interviewed for “Who Is America?” However, those of us on the outside are in no position to second-guess too aggressively, because we don’t know what claims were made to induce the subjects to be interviewed.

There are allegations that Baron Cohen and his staff gained credibility by telling interview targets they were working on a series for Showtime.  If that’s true, I think this is the last time any sane person would allow himself to appear in a program described as a Showtime documentary.  On the other hand, at least one of the Baron Cohen characters apparently represented himself as a representative of truthbrary.org, which purports to be a conspiracy-oriented website.  If anyone clicked on this outlandish site and still agreed to the interview, then he got everything he deserved.

My guess is that few if any PR handlers were involved in arranging these interviews.  The people who appear in “Who Is America?” fall into two general categories: 1) politicians like Bernie Sanders, Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney, who have been interviewed so many times that their staffs probably no longer bother to do rudimentary checks on interviewers; and 2) regular schmoes who are interviewed so rarely that they don’t even know they should do some research first.

Reporters sometimes claim that public relations people run interference between them and potential newsmakers — but shows like “Who Is America?” and “The Daily Show” demonstrate why so many people use PR staff to shield them from potential mockery.   If I were in the Public Relations Society of America, I would launch a PR campaign based solely on Sacha Baron Cohen clips with the tagline, “Don’t Let This Happen To You!”

We Could All Use a Little Mr. Rogers Just About Now

The surprising popularity of the recent documentary about Mr. Rogers – “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” – shouldn’t really be a surprise given the state of the world.  After all, we could all use a hug from a kind uncle in a cardigan sweater right about now.

To be sure, the film is “popular” only in comparison to other documentaries, not in relation to something like “The Incredibles 2.”  But playing mostly in art houses, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” has already sold more than $12 million in tickets and still increasing audiences after five weeks in the theatres, which makes it a major hit on the documentary circuit.

Fred Rogers, the Episcopalian minister-turned-children’s-storyteller, was such an overwhelming presence in popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s that’s it’s hard to believe there’s been an entire generation of Millennials who have grown up not knowing who he was.  Since his 2003 death, he has largely faded from public view and it’s been ten years since reruns of “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood” were regularly rebroadcast.

Mr. Rogers was a product of his time, but it would be inaccurate to say that he lived in a gentler era.  As the film makes clear, Fred Rogers developed his show in response to the violent programming that dominated children’s television at the time.   And he emerged in a period that was even more brutal than our own.  One of his earliest shows dealt explicitly with the issue of Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination and the Vietnam War loomed over all television programming in those days.

In a turbulent time, Mr. Rogers believed that the way to calm children’s fears was to address them directly and reassure young viewers that it was OK to be scared but that their parents would keep them safe.

In an effort to hype the importance and uniqueness of Mr. Rogers, the documentary fails to acknowledge earlier gentle, calming shows that helped to socialize and reassure young children.  “Captain Kangaroo” and “Romper Room,” groundbreaking shows from the early days of television, were the philosophical antecedents of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

But Captain Kangaroo” and “Romper Room” were on commercial television, which would have diminishing enthusiasm for shows that appealed to preschoolers.  Network children’s programming grew increasingly aggressive and was eventually seen primarily as a vehicle for selling toys.

Mr. Rogers was important because he came along at the dawn of public broadcasting.  One of the most arresting sequences is the movie is his testimony before a Senate committee in 1969, which essentially saved the young PBS network.  At a hearing to defund PBS, Mr. Rogers so charmed Chairman John Pastore in just six minutes that Pastore completely changed his mind about public television and restored the full funding on the spot.

It’s hard to not to get a lump in your throat watching Mr. Rogers’ Senate testimony – or any other part of the movie, for that matter.  When we came out of the theater my wife said she’d been in tears the whole time and I know what she meant.  The whole movie is a meditation on what it’s like to be a young child and if you can remember your own early days or even if you can remember being the parent of a four-year-old, the movie reminds us of how fraught those years can be.

It was Mr. Rogers contention that children are swirling with more emotions than we give them credit for.  And not just joy and wonderment, but also fear, anger, and sadness too.  Mr. Rogers wanted to acknowledge and respect those feelings so children could learn how to process them and grow into mentally healthy adults.  Seeing how he implemented this philosophy on the show and in his direct dealings with children is actually quite moving.

It’s a sad commentary on our cynical society, though, that the documentary felt it necessary to address the question of whether Mr. Rogers was gay.  He was a happily married man with two children of his own.  There were no rumors of any improper extra-marital activity with either gender, and yet people remained suspicious of an adult man with a natural sing-songy voice who liked to spend time with children.   People mistrust those who seem too good to be true, but apparently “in real life” Mr. Rogers was exactly as patient, generous, and kind as he seemed on the screen.

The big unanswered question from the movie is whether Mr. Rogers was on the winning or losing side of history.  Everyone gives lip service to his principles but children today are exposed to more screen violence than ever before through video games, the Internet and old-fashioned television that increasingly features swearing, sexual content and violence every night.

All the more reason, then, to see “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.”  It might be a losing battle to treat children with respect but Mr. Rogers can inspire us to think that it’s worth the fight.

 

 

Yay, America!

The Fourth of July is the day we celebrate America and what better way than through a celebration of America-themed music? I’m not talking about overtly patriotic songs.  I doubt the Marine Band will ever play any of these songs on the White House lawn, but still, they do offer a glimpse of the vast tapestry that is America:

America (Simon and Garfunkel)

We’re An American Band (Grand Funk Railroad)

America (West Side Story)

Courtesy of the Red White and Blue (Toby Keith)

American Tune (Simon and Garfunkel)

Living In The USA (Steve Miller Band)

Born in the USA (Bruce Springsteen)

American Pie (Don McLean)

 

Philadelphia Freedom (Elton John)

American Girl (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers)

R.O.C.K. In the USA (John Mellencamp)

Living In America (James Brown)

Coming to America (Neil Diamond)

Rockin in the USA (Kiss)

Party in the U.S.A. (Miley Cyrus)