'The Colbert Report' Recap: Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O'Connell

On the episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen discussed artists, FOX news, the government shutdown and Lance Armstrong.

I am officially tired of this dumb government shutdown. I know that the US is losing money and millions of workers are furloughed and that is terrible. I know that the country may default and be unable to pay its bills. But, the shutdown has taken over The Colbert Report as well.

Stephen began the episode mocking the shutdown by using a punch card. He said that, because he had 10 punches, he gets a free emboli monkey from the CDC.

He transitioned to the “death match” between President Obama and Representative John Boehner. The update on their shutdown conversation, according to Stephen, was that they had found more things to disagree about.

After the short segment about the shutdown, Stephen transitioned to his fun and typical mocking of FOX News. His target of the evening was Shepard Smith and FOX News’ new news desk.

He said that most newsmen muddle themselves to be like their heroes. Stephen stated that his hero was Shepard Smith. Stephen then discussed Smith’s covering of a daredevil jumping out of a plane in a casket. Because the camera never caught the man coming out of the plane, Smith asked his viewers to close their eyes and imagine that they were seeing it.

Then, he mocked Smith covering Fox’s new news desk. The news desk was high tech and new. Stephen compared it to Star Trek Enterprise in that they were both allusions. He mocked FOX by stating that, according to them, “bigger plus electric equals news.”

Smith showed the audience the giant news screen that he could move pictures around with a remote. (Side note: It would be perfect for watching sports on. You could watch two games at once!) As Smith moved around pictures of people after crises, Stephen compared it to Tragedy Wii.

Also in the new FOX newsroom, the reporters had a twitter board with reports that they confirmed to report on the air. They had producers to sit in chairs, make calls and try to make sure that the tweets were accurate.

Stephen said that the news desk reminded him of the film Minority Report which was crazy because, as Stephen believed, FOX News doesn’t report on minorities.

Because of Fox’s new room, Stephen wanted to compete. He made a giant screen in his studio and said that it was impressive because it was also his iPhone. Because it was his iPhone, he got a call from his Nana.

Also, instead of having a big screen, Stephen’s screen was so big that his producers needed to scale the giant wall of screens. The producer fell off during the bit and Stephen said that, because of it, that was now newsworthy.

Stephen also debuted his system, calling it the Big Unbelievably Large LED Super Hyper Information Technology or BULLS--T. Stephen then shared his unbelievably long system to spread the news.

First it would go to his feline media managers whom would find the news like a cat chasing a red laser. The cats, however, didn’t chase the laser but the cats were on top of multiple iPads, scanning the news.

The news would then go into a news separator (a printer), then it would go into a nano information separator (shredder). After the news is shredded, it is put into a journo-chamber (a man in a box, trying to grab a flying scrap of paper). After that, a news falcon (he used a real falcon!) will bring Stephen the news. Then, he would put the news into a tweet-robot that would sketch the stories onto the moon. After that, they would fact check.

The robot then attacked Stephen for not having real news and it cut to a commercial.

The final story that Stephen covered was the wall-art story. He said that wall art was a bad example leading kids to a life of crime or art school. Someone had painted on Stephen’s building’s wall a picture of a bear with Stephen’s head on it. He was shocked that someone knew what he looked like “before the body wax.”

Instead of saying that it was a “Col-bear,” he joked that the painting meant that he was a “Col-grizzly.” “Hansky” made the painting, making Stephen believe that Tom Hanks had been the one to do it.

Stephen said that he left spray paint in Hanks’ dressing room and he assumed that he was the one that did it. I, personally, hope that Hanks did. Can you imagine how cool that would be? The headline could be “Artful actor turned actor artist.”

Check out the bit about the wall art below. It was the high point of the episode.

Stephen interviewed Wall Street Journal reporters Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O'Connell. They wrote a book about Lance Armstrong. In the interview, they discussed what type of reporters they were and why they chose to write about the doping biker.