Roy Wood Jr. used the words of former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to inspire the crowd at the 78th annual Writers Guild Awards on Sunday night, much to their surprise.
The attendees inside the NYC’s Edison Ballroom were baited into uproarious laughter as the former Daily Show correspondent opened the show first with a seemingly sincere, stark set of warnings from someone that he called “a profound philosopher.”
That person, he said, once warned “rich, powerful people are doing horrible things.”
As he spoke, the Have I Got News for You host cited some of the more obnoxious illustrations of the declining state of the media industry as of late, including Amazon’s $75M spend on Melania, the recent pivot by streamers to “video podcasts” as talk shows flounder and the turmoil at CBS News since Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison tapped Bari Weiss to lead the news organization.
“That same great philosopher also told us, ‘Both sides need to take off their political blinders. You all are being incited into civil war, yet none of it solves any of the real problems we all face,’” he added later in his speech.
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“So with that, I urge all of you to continue to make an original content that challenges the human mind pushes back on conventional ideals, because our government understands one thing clearly. If you control what people see, then you control how the country sees itself. If you can do that, you don’t even need to rig an election,” he told the writers in front of him. “So the journalists, the writers, the entertainers in this room just know that we’re Ground Zero. We’re fighting the fight. Keep telling the truth and keep pushing because, lastly, that philosopher also told us it was all a lie. It was a big lie for the people.
“And I think we can all agree with that person’s great words, and we can all agree that we cannot leave telling the truth solely to Marjorie Taylor Greene,” he concluded.
Also throughout his speech, Wood alluded to the pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, joking that most people probably know him from “being Black on The Daily Show,” but he’s chosen to leave that gig and go to CNN to avoid the instability that was sure to come from the then-pending merger between Paramount and Comedy Central.
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“They don’t want to just control messaging domestically,” he said. “They want to control messaging overseas. Our government has shown a willingness to go into places and replace them with people willing to do the bidding of this administration. We saw it in Venezuela. We’re seeing it now in Iran. Before both of those, we saw it at CBS.”
As the audience chuckled, Wood then took a moment to assure any CBS News writers (who are members of the WGA East) in the crowd could comfortably laugh at his punch line, whispering, “She’s not here.”