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The Daily Show as Substantive as Broadcast News
Walter C. writes "Anyone who watches the evening news with any regularity knows that it's not a bastion of substance. However, a new study conducted by researchers at Indiana University reports that The Daily Show has just as much substance to it as the broadcast news. 'The researchers looked at coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions and the first presidential debate of the fall campaign, all of which were covered by the mainstream broadcast news outlets and The Daily Show... There was just as much substance to The Daily Show's coverage as there was on the network news. And The Daily Show was much funnier, with less of the hype — references to photo ops, political endorsements, and polls — that typically overshadows substantive coverage on network news, according to the study.'"
That the News has as little substance as The Daily Show?
Yeah... and I'm sure it wasn't an accident that CNN stuck an X over Cheney... Bah. I once saw CNN mislabel Syria as Iraq on a map graphic once. I'm sure CNN wasn't trying to erase Syria... I'm sure CNN wasn't trying to erase Cheney. I'm also sure Fox wasn't trying to convince viewers Foley was a democrat...
While you might be able to make a case for any news show being 'full of bullshit,' it is my opinion that The Daily Show's viewers retain so much more information because it is entertaining. News? Entertaining? That's right.
How do I know what bills are being passed? How do I know who Zell Miller is? Well, if you ever saw the "Zell on Earth" episode from Indecision 2004, you'd never forget the man. If CNN, Fox, CBS, ABC, whoever else tried to cover that, I would have fallen asleep. Not only does it cover just as much material, but I retain far more of it.
My work here is dung.
But why did they put "Mark Foley (D)" at the bottom of the screen? When Foley is a congressional Republican? Are you retarded or something?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
I bet it's relaxing to not have to think for yourself.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Note that the article make clear they aren't saying the Daily Show's reporting is good--just that it is equally good as serious news shows. What they are saying is, American TV news is a joke.
They stopped being about "news" a long time ago.
Now, they are ALL about "entertainment". Which is why CNN has "The Situation Room" and such.
The Daily Show SHOULD be operating with a handicap. They have to focus solely on the items that they can turn into a joke. That should not be easy. They should be scraping the bottom of the barrel.
But they have one advantage that the "news" shows do not. The Daily Show has SMART people working for it. They REMEMBER previous statements by politicians and they are not afraid to show how the politicians contradict themselves.
When was the last time you saw actual analysis and comparisons of a politician's statements on a regular news program. Yet they are a staple of The Daily Show. Because it is FUNNY when they catch a politician contradicting him/herself. And then The Daily Show will continue to hammer on the joke.
It should be stupid. It should be lame. But because the regular "news" shows have abandoned even the pretense of being about "news", The Daily Show wins by default.
The Daily Show mines recent events for jokes.
Regular news shows can't even mine recent events for news.
+5, Confused
If you read the article, it's saying that the news offers as much substance as The Daily Show, not that either does a good job of being a news show. Basically, it's calling the state of US news shitty.
Ok, this study is flawed. they are comparing coverage of a political even to. The Daly Show is a left wing propaganda outfit and as such will have a good deal of coverage of political events, however main stream news also give time to many other events. The Daily Show ignores any event that they can not easily use to support democrats or spread FUD but the president with.
So completely ignoring the bias of this show it has a much narrower focus, and any study that simply take one item that the show is focused on and comparing it to a very general news cast is not a fair comparison.
If you'd read the article you linked to it talks about The Daily Show vs. The Tonight Show and The Late Show. I wouldn't call either of those network news.
One could argue that the real difference is that broadcast news is cynical and doesn't know it.
Why? Because while I find the cynicism of Stewart and especially Colbert to be quite corrosive, it's seeing bullsh*t delivered with a straight face on the network news that makes me really cynical. Having Stewart call them on it reminds me that sanity is not completely lost.
A journalist can tell you facts.
A comedian can tell you truths.
We already know. Seriously. The reason everyone I know gets their news from the Internet isn't because it's more convenient, it's because it's more likely to be meaningful.
The BBC isn't all that, either, you know. It's leaps and bounds better than anything in the States, but it's got a very discernable conservative bias, and it's too damn polite to ever dig very deep. And CNN International? Why are you giving them a pass? It's the same shit with a broader focus, does that make it better?
The problem is English. Ever since the last bastion of balanced journalism in the US collapsed (NPR in the late nineties), I've been searching for a good English-language news source. I can't find one. I can find plenty of partisan hack jobs with an agenda, from Al Jazeera to CNN, and try to filter through the vapidity and outright bullshit, but frankly I could make up the news and I'd have a good chance of having more insight into current events than any of them.
So if you know a really good foreign news source with an English version online, I'm all ears. Americans are STARVED for decent news.
If the pols stop talking to the media, they won't get their face in the public. If they don't get that exposure, who will vote for them?
The politicians need the media a lot more than the media needs the politicians.
The ______ Agenda
Am I the only one here who gets her news from newspapers, ala The New York Times and The Wallstreet Journal? One of the most enjoyable parts of my day is sipping coffee in the morning while reading the newspapers. I can't stand any evening television broadcast of the news, Daily Show or otherwise.
Have you ever read transcripts of the television news casts? Each story is usually a paragraph of text at most, whereas the reporting on the same subject in a newspaper will usually be several columns.
It saddens me that today's youth brags about getting all their news from the daily show while newspaper circulation is in rapid decline.
The issue isn't that The Daily Show is so much better ... it's that network news sucks so bad.
The big problem is that the mainstream media merely report what politicians say with a straight face, and avoid pointing out the absurdities and hypocrisies behind those statements. Why? Because to do so would make them appear "unobjective". In an environment where politics is a three-ring circus, it takes a comedy show to reveal how things really are done.
"I can't be more succinct." No but you might try to be a little smarter from where you get your "news" from. I know this guy bubba down on 12th and market and HE seems to have the inside scoop on everything. You might wan't to look him up !!!
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
Is it just me, or does the Colbert Report make The Daily Show seem semi-legit? Colbert's show is so stuffed with sarcasm and trolling -- on purpose -- it makes Jon Stewart look like Cronkite (well, almost).
I've been a fan of both programs for quite a while. While their political slants are easy to see, they seem to try to stay as fair as possible -- making fun of both sides pretty equally.
You keep using that word - I do not think it mean.. oh forget... the point is this... that one is blatantly obvious. Nobody is going to read that and go "*GASP* He's a fascist!? Let's oust him!"
But the whole (D) vs (R) thing in U.S. TV is subtle. They don't refer to it, it's not blatantly obvious if you haven't heard of the person they're talking about, so your initial reaction may be (if you're part of Fox's target viewership anyway): "damn democrats"
And maybe I live in a distorted world, but I find -that- to be much worse than some idiot proclaiming Bush a professional fascist.
They're Establishment - when I want examples of conservative news organizations, I use them for radio and New York Times for print. They're not part of the Bush-Cheney-Rove right-wing mafia that's taken over Washington the last few years (but those thugs have Fox News when they need a mouthpiece.) If I want an example of left-wing media, there's Pacifica, who are unabashedly leftie; it's much easier to work around the biases of a bunch of up-front lefties telling you about some horrendous thing Bush did this time than it is to guess which stories CBS/NBC/ABC didn't report on. (And my use of the NYT as "conservative" doesn't mean I'm far left of the US center - I view the Washington Post as a partisan Democrat paper, and when I worked in DC I'd be more likely to read the Washington Times, which was right-wing and less competent, but did a better job of telling what the then-Democrat Congress was doing, and you could work around its biases about what Reagan, Bush, and Ollie were doing.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They do put a disclaimer in front. Then again, I don't think most people take CNN seriously as a newschannel outside the US.
Je ne parle pas francais.
IIRC, 50% of Americans think that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. 50%. That's unbelievable. Why do they think this? Because that's what Fox told them.
If Fox tells the cattle (deliberately, IMHO) that Foley is a democrat, they'll believe them.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Yeah, but the Daily Show is funny.
There's a saying, "Once is coincidence, twice is hapenstance, three times is enemy action". FOX news labeled Foley as "D-FL" in three separate instances. I could see it as a typo if it had happened once, but three separate times? Nope, I'm pretty sure its because FOX knows that the vast majority of their viewers never watch any other news source so they know they can say anything they want to and their viewers will believe it.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
I think the fact that you're (apparently) unwilling to accept "open criticism" of the American government says a hell of a lot more about you than it does about Jon Stewart.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I have to agree. It's really kind of sad, though. The O'Reilly factor used to be such a good show, and I'm being entirely serious. This may be hard for you to believe, but there's a reason why he became so popular: he was good. Sure, he was mostly conservative, but he used to a respectable analyst that called it as he fairly as he could. In fact, I think if most people who dislike O'Reilly read his books, they'd probably find themselves agreeing with him more than they didn't.
Unfortunately, he sold out--ironically enough to the "media establishment" that he spoke out so boldly against in his books and previous programs... It's hard to say when, but by my observations it happened approximately six months or so before that sex scandal story became public. When it happened, though, the difference was night and day. All of the sudden, the hard-hitting stories disappeared and were replaced by the "child predator"/flag-burning tripe that characterizes our "news" these days. I can't even watch the show anymore, and this is coming from someone who used to have a "The Spin Stops Here"-doormat in font of his appartment.
Make no mistake; this incident was no accident. As others have mentioned, the O'Reilly factor is a pre-recorded flagship show. The mistakes that typically characterize the 24-hour news networks simply do not happen on these shows. I'm not one to advocate consipiracies, but somebody was definitely pulling the strings on this one...
-Grym
I don't think that will work in practice by might as well give it a try... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/one en.wikipedia.org/wiki/two en.wikipedia.org/wiki/three en.wikipedia.org/wiki/four en.wikipedia.org/wiki/five en.wikipedia.org/wiki/six en.wikipedia.org/wiki/seven en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eight en.wikipedia.org/wiki/nine en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ten en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eleven en.wikipedia.org/wiki/twelve en.wikipedia.org/wiki/thirteen en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fourteen en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fifteen en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sixteen en.wikipedia.org/wiki/seventeen
Apparently Stewart no longer cares about balancing his show for the opinions of his more conservative viewers
Maybe that's because the Democrats haven't done anything funny recently (only a party in power would have the consistent opprotunity to screw up).
Also, why would you ever expect a comedian to be "fair and balanced"? TDS is a comedy show and I would expect the biases of the comedians to come in to play (in the same way if you went and saw a stand up comedian and he or she started talking politics, you would expect it to be thier biased opinion).
I admit, I don't really understand the American desire for journalists to not be biased (I live in the UK, but I watch every episode of TDS on More 4) - I'd much rather have thier biases out in the open so I can pick and choose which news source I want to listen to. They've tried to import that concept here with TV news (which is suppossed to be "fair and balanced", at least on the BBC, I'm not sure of the others), but it doesn't work that well (the bias still comes shining through). I'd much rather pick my TV news like I can pick my newspapers, where the biases are both obvious and well known.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
There is no possible way in which Fox could have not known that this was inaccurate and in the show before they broadcast it, nor any way in which it is believable that they would have found it too difficult to fix had it been a genuine "mistake." They broadcast it anyway.
A typo is an accidental mistype you fail to spot before publication. Not a deliberate lie you deliberately allow to be published.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Jon Stewart takes the time to learn about his guest's point of view BEFORE the show happened.
Last night he had on a political science professor with a book to shill, "The J Curve".
And it was immediately obvious that Jon had READ THE BOOK, or at least enough of it to grasp the central thesis. He played ignorant a couple of times (for laughs) but he clearly was keeping up with the guest and knew what he was talking about.
Do you think any of the Fox News pundits ever do that? Can you see Bill O'Reily (say) going to a screening of Al Gore's global warming movie and actually paying attention to it?
Seriously, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert give me hope that there still exists intelligence and rational thought in America. They should both run on the same Presidential ticket.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Compare EU news channels with US ones. In the EU, 'centre' is quite a long way to the left of where the US presents 'center.' And since rational people know that they don't want to be extremists, moderates in the EU are quite a long way to the left of moderates in the US.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Keith Olbermann's Countdown is the only true real news show where journalism ideals are strived for. Olbermann strives to fit Morrow's shoes in a modern context. He does many of the things that people have pointed out the Daily Show does- showing the current leadership contradicting themselves, mocking the infotainment, mocking the news media for saying asinine things (favorite and easiest target Bill O'Reilly) He was the only newscaster in 2004 who reported seriously in the voting machine stories after the election. And he clearly can't abide the blatant lying done by the current administration; he's made several "special comments" about this in recent months. The one weak point, Keith does have on too many Republican mouthpieces as regular commentators, and doesn't call them on their lies. (a polite rebuttal would be nice, no need for stupid shout downs, just something along the lines of what Jon Stewart does when he calls a guest on their spin. Jon is more likely to do that to a reporter than any other guest.) I just wonder why Keith doesn't, when his occasional special commentaries shows he knows they are lying. I've taken to hitting mute when the spinmiester Republican commentators come on; heck Scarborough was more honest when he sat in that spot last night on Keith's show. I started to hit mute but listened to the first sentence before I did, and when Scarborough didn't do the talking points (much) I left the volume up. Olbermann is no "flaming liberal", he's certainly more of the moderate persuasion. I'm mainstream liberal. I find some of the things said on Air America too "tinfoil hat"- the conspiracy stuff especially. I'm a natural skeptic like most mainstream liberals. You're going to have to show me hard proof that something that sounds too outrageous happened- like I still don't believe the Bush administration was directly involved in causing 9/11. I think they just showed arrogance and willful ignorance and didn't believe it could happen here. Olbermann is an old school moderate who has become so outraged at what the Bush adminstration has done that he's coming closer to mainstream liberalism, at least in his heart. It's made him an even better journalist than the pretty good one he was before. Word of mouth is spreading about his show being the one place in the msm where journalism lives. His ratings are climbing every month, so much so that it's even filtered over to the Fox news viewers, they are losing viewers in droves the past few months, and Olbermann's Countdown is the news show that has shown the largest growth in viewers. This is why Olbermann has been able to speak his mind more openly, even though corporation he works for is as Republican biased as all the other msm, Olbermann's ratings trump that. Now, if only they'd grow a clue and dump Carlson and bring Donohue back. The wind is finally starting to favor moderate to liberal voices, if the mainstream news media had any brains they'd be hiring more liberal newscasters- heck get a few leftists like Mike Malloy while they are at it. if they can have all these far right wingers on, they ought to balance it with some leftists, then get a few mainstream liberals like Donohue, and liberal leaning moderates like Olbermann, Rather and Moyers. Of course, if they did that, it would show just how nuts the right wingers who host most of the msm newcasts really are. (It'd expose the crazy on the leftist side too, while showing the mainstream liberals and liberal leaning moderates as the sane, intelligent and normal viewpoints.)