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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?
I've been watching TDS for news for awhile now. I can't stomach the other news shows ... they're so full of bullshit. Just yesterday Fox News repeatedly tried to claim that Mark Foley was a Democrat. No thanks, I think I'd rather watch funny satire than bald-faced lies and propaganda.
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The Daily Show: Where more Americans get their news than probably should.
There was a study that already showed The Daily Show's audience was better informed about the news than people who just watched the regular news.o litics/
... it's that network news sucks so bad.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/28/comedy.p
The issue isn't that The Daily Show is so much better
Or as Mr. Stewart put it (paraphrased) "The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls".
are before the show for godsake!
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.
You'll also notice that the daily show is one of the only "news" outlets that will show a video clip of a public figure saying one thing in 2004, then a new video with them saying something that completely goes against their first comment on the matter in 2004. None of the big news outlets dare show such a stunt because that would make public figures accountable. Of course the daily show usually has Jon Stewert making a funny face and then goes to the next topic, but at least they aren't afraid to make someone eat their own words.
For once this doesn't really have anything to do with Slashdot editing. The linked to article makes the same extrapolation. The actual title of the study is apparently No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign. I dont see any links to it, but it sounds like it supports that case for at least that specific story. Generalizing the specifics of a story for the purposes of headlines is pretty common amongst news sources.
The other candidates wouldn't matter, Colbert and Stewart would win by a landslide. I'd actually register to vote them into office.
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.
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.
Why do you have a link to cynicism? Do you think other people don't know that word.
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.
TDS may be left wing but they do mock the Democrats a lot. Jon Stewart even called them Ewoks once in reference to their powerlessness, mocked John Kerry many times, as well as picked on many other Democrats. Stewart has even said in interviews with other shows that the Democrat's message is weak to the point of being worthless that they really aren't an effective alternative to sway voters away from the Republicans.
You sir, are an idiot. It is as if you haven't ever watched the show, you know full well that they attack both democrats and republicans equally. Both extreme sides of the political spectrum are very good fodder for a political comedian. In case you haven't noticed, the democrats haven't been much in the spotlight since the republicans took both houses, therefore there is very little news to make fun of.
Meet new people, and kill them.
Apparently Stewart no longer cares about balancing his show for the opinions of his more conservative viewers.
No, not really, he just knows his audience.
He realized a long time ago that Republicans have no sense of humor.
And, they're all child molesters.
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It could be worse. One of the major channels in New Zealand "accidentally" had a caption that listed President Bush as a "professional facsist". I believe te official comment from the TV station essentially amounted to "Oops".
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I can't remember whether it was in Montreal, Paris, or Mexico, but I've seen The Daily Show come on right after a "real" news show on CNN International. And I didn't see any disclaimer about it being satire, either. Folks elsewhere must have a really interesting perception of what's going on in the U.S.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
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.)
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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.
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
That's quite true. A few years back, when I lived in my home country, the cable network offered three CNN channels: the "normal" one, CNN International, and CNN en Español, along with Fox News, and several news channels from Europe: BBC, DW (Germany), RAI (Italy), TVE (Spain), a French one called Channel 5 or something; and also a few from Latin America.
From the what I could gather from the channels in the languages I don't speak, all the non-US channels did a fairly good job at covering news from outside their own countries. It was shocking to see how crappy the basic CNN and Fox were. In particular it was shocking because CNN International was about as good as the international ones, and CNN en Español managed to cover with some depth the news from ALL Latin America (including Brazil) plus Spain and Portugal, and STILL the coverage of news from US, Canada and the rest of the world was very good - much better than the regular CNN.
The saddest part is that all CNN channels claimed to be produced in their studios in Atlanta, and of course they shared the same material. So the problem is not that the basic CNN channel doesn't have access to high quality material, it's that they deliberately choose not to present it, most certainly because their main audience has no interest in it.
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
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you misspelled "accurately"