From Yahoo! News:
Colbert: AP the Biggest Threat to
America By JAKE COYLE, AP Entertainment Writer
54 minutes ago
Stung by a recent Associated Press article that didn't credit him for coining the
word "truthiness," Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert has struck back.
The world's oldest news organization, Colbert says, is the "No. 1 threat facing
America."
On Wednesday evening, Colbert placed the AP atop the Threat Down segment of "The Colbert Report" show. What was No. 2?
Bears.
In October, on Colbert's debut episode of the "Daily Show" spinoff, the comedian defined "truthiness" as
truth that wouldn't stand to be held back by facts. The
word caught on, and last week the American Dialect
Society named "truthiness" the word of the year.
When an AP story about the designation sent coast to coast failed to mention Colbert, he began a tongue-in-cheek crusade, not unlike the kind his muse Bill O'Reilly might lead in all seriousness.
"It's a sin of omission, is what it is," Colbert told The AP on
Thursday. "You're not giving people the whole story about truthiness."
"It's like Shakespeare still being alive and not asking him what `Hamlet' is about," he said.
The Oxford English
Dictionary has a definition for "truthy" dating back to the 1800s. It's defined as "characterized by
truth" and includes the derivation "truthiness."
Michael Adams, a visiting associate professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in lexicology, pointed to that definition and has said Colbert's claim to inventing the word is "untrue." (Adams served as the expert opinion in the initial AP story.)
"The fact that they looked it up in a book just shows that they don't get the idea of truthiness at all," Colbert said
Thursday. "You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut."
Though slight, the difference of Colbert's definition and the OED's is essential. It's not your typical
truth, but, as The New York Times wrote, "a summation of what (Colbert) sees as the guiding ethos of the loudest commentators on Fox News, MSNBC and CNN."
Colbert, who referred on his program to the AP omission as a "journalistic travesty," said
Thursday that it was similar to the much-criticized weapons of mass destruction reporting leading up to the Iraq
War.
"Except," he said, "people got hurt this time."
