The Daily Show as Substantive as Broadcast News 669
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.'"
Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well duh (Score:2, Insightful)
Entertainment = Retention (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Amen... (Score:1, Insightful)
The article doesn't say the Daily Show is good. (Score:4, Insightful)
News programs ARE entertainment. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Weak, ver weak. But typical. (Score:3, Insightful)
+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.
Flawed Study (Score:0, Insightful)
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.
Re:Old news. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Main Difference (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Deep Truth (Score:5, Insightful)
A comedian can tell you truths.
Take it from an American (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Accountable Recordkeeping (Score:5, Insightful)
The politicians need the media a lot more than the media needs the politicians.
Re:News programs ARE entertainment. (Score:5, Insightful)
Balanced & Objective != Truth
News programs nowadays keep trying to present "both" sides of an issue. Well... not everything has two sides.
There are facts. Not everyone's opinion or interpretation of those facts is equal to everyone else's.
The Daily Show is what would be considered advocacy journalism (as opposed to objective journalism). Advocacy journalism "is fact-based, but supports a specific point of view on one or more issues."
Newspapers, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
To say that the Daily Show has as much substance as network news is a vague statement about the Daily Show; to say that the news has as little substance as the Daily Show is a sharp criticism of the news.
Re:Old news. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course then there are the fart jokes.
Re:Amen...Duh (Score:3, Insightful)
Colbert legitimizes TDS (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:News programs ARE entertainment. (Score:2, Insightful)
When Bill Clinton was president.
Worse? Not so... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:1, Insightful)
How many times do we really need to hear that Bush is a dumbfuck, or see Stewart shilling for the latest Democratic candidate?
NPR/PBS is strongly biased - but intelligent (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
Re:News programs ARE entertainment. (Score:1, Insightful)
Why are you people so afraid of Fox News? Is it because they don't toe the same line that NBC/ABC/CBS/CNN/MSNBC and the national newspapers toe? Exactly what is it about dissenting political opinion has you so frightened and angry for? Is it not a function of this Representative Republic that we live in, that we have the ability and right to have opinions that differ from the establishment?
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say you're projecting. If you think that opposition to Bush stems only from dems or liberals, then I'm sorry, but you're just plain wrong. There are plenty of right wingers, including almost every conservative who isn't either a religious loony or a neo-con, who dislike Bush for reasons ranging from the deficit (fiscal conservative my ass) to civil liberties (remeber when "rights" were a conservative ideal? It was what seperated us from the USSR for crying out loud!)
Stewart sounds like a cynical libertarian to me, not a liberal. He'll readily decry the democrats when they go against his own idea of right and wrong, or when they act spineless, or when they suck up to the neo-cons. He'd fit right in on
Re:CNN carries it, outside the US. Really. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well duh (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:What about this article? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, but the Daily Show is funny.
Re:Well duh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say that Stewart is a centrist and definately a cynic. By most international standards (I'm Canadian for the record), he's actually more conservative than liberal. Libertarian is perhaps a bit optimistic (I don't entirely agree with the other AC on that), but he certainly isn't liberal from where I'm standing.
Now, Stewart might support the Democrats over the Republicans on balance, but that isn't quite the same as having liberal bias. Disliking someone and liking their opposite aren't the same. And, softball interview with Kerry or no, he has gone to town on the Democrats more than once. If they controlled any branch of the government, he'd probably go after them more, since he seems to work by attacking the establishment.
Even if he does support a Democratic candidate, for him that might be as simple as wanting to restore balance of power; I've seen many Americans arguing in favour of having different parties in control of the different wings of government to keep them deadlocked. I could see him supporting a classical conservative candidate if the Republicans chose to field one.
Re:Come On (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point of the press and news in general is to help the common guy/girl with how their democracy and their representatives are doing. I should not be expected to make a concerted effort everytime a politician says something to go through my archive of news bullentins stretching back a few years to see if the VP was lying/deceiving or not. It is the responsibility of the press and news to do the leg work for me in an objective way as possible. If one news organisation wants to say "he couldn't remember, which is different from lying so we won't pick up on it" that's fine; but I also expect some people to pick up on the codewords for "i know i said it but I'll play safe and hope the average viewer won't remember" which is what TDS did.
It's a fine line between a democracy that is for the people and a democracy that is for some of people.
Ciao
Re:Well duh (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Main Difference (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
He doesn't grill people that come on the show. In general he has celebrities and the interviews are usually about them. Essentially he softballs everyone because it's not a news show. Those aren't news interviews they are more akin as to what happens on the late show. Bush was also invited and he would have gotten the same treatment.
Re:Come On (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:News programs ARE entertainment. (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that is the entire explanation. They have smart people, and they put an effort into producing something of quality. The normal news channels, on the other hand, are interested in presenting news in a way that appeals to as many people as possible, by putting the least amount of effort into it as possible. Just like websites or anything else, content is what matters.
There's a billboard here that says "Elegance is in the details". That's exactly right; anything of quality, you have to work on it, like a work of art.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Very nice repetition of Tucker Carlson's argument [cnn.com] against The Daily Show on Crossfire in - what, 2004? Do you guys have some kind of handbook that you use to remind you what the Party Line is? Perhaps a Little Red Book?
Outright hatred of AMERICAN values? I've got news for you, buddy: Current Republican "values" are closer to al Qaeda's values than they are to American values. Most of your "values" issues are ones on which the average Wahabbist could nod his head in agreement.
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:4, Insightful)
ONLY the daily show had the balls to sat that Senator Sicko was cranking off clum babys to little boys and trying to seduce them online.... plus connected that he was the bastard responsible for overseeing internet child safety.
FOX news, CNN, CNBC did not have the balls to call the senator what he is.
I give John Stewart way more credibility than any other TV journalist. All the other journalists are wishy washy, refuse to ask the hard questions, and only report what their controllers tell them to, and then candy coat it... unless it's about "TERROR"
and yes, this is very sad that a comedy show that is supposed to be giving us humor about the news turns out to be the only real source for news.
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
Over here, some of the best investigative journalism about government and corporate failings I've ever seen was on the Mark Thomas Comedy Product - http://www.mtcp.co.uk/ [mtcp.co.uk].
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
The Daily Show is aiming at Funny and still hitting True or Informative as often as the news shows.
In addition, you know the Daily Show isn't aiming primarily at True or Informative, so you don't automatically believe everything you hear, but are more likely to check elsewhere for confirmation.
News shows claim a monopoly on Truth and Informativeness, and rely on a historical veneer of impartiality to stop people checking up on them elsewhere.
Thus the Daily Show is arguably a better primary source of information than mainstream news shows - at least it admits it's inaccurate, and tries relatively hard to skewer both main parties equally. That's way better than a one-sided partial propaganda organ that nevertheless claims it's "fair and balanced"...
There's more to it: (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Newspapers, anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
How to Watch TV News [amazon.com] is a fascinating analysis on just why that is. In summation, TV as a different form of media compared to print isn't suited to news with the exception of visual news such as national disasters. For politics and international affairs, TV news doesn't have the time to spend on each issue to give much information across. Instead you get sound bites. On the other hand, Katrina and 9-11 were ratings goldmines.
Ultimately it always comes down to ratings, the bottom line in any media endevour. Americans also don't like bad news, which is why Newsweek localises it's cover for the US market. Example (27 Sept 2006): internationally the cover story was "losing Afganistan". In the states, they got [wikipedia.org] a fluff piece about the photographer Annie Leibovitz.
I'm not sure that they are saying that it's their only source though. For me it's the only US news source I trust, but I round it off with many other international sources. I'm finding blogs are the best these days, simply to act as a filter onto media I wouldn't normally read. Take the Christian Science Monitor; normally I'd stay the hell away from them simply based on their name (Christian science?), but I've read some linked articles on there from time to time that are changing my preconceptions on them.
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's look at it through the other end of the telescope. You show why the Daily Show is beter entertainment than the evening news. The question we should be asking is, why is it better news than the evening news?
The answer came to me when I was thinking about the obvious liberal bias of the show. Now before liberal fans of the show skewer me, let me say that I am a liberal fan of the show. Every show has, not just one bias, but many biases. You have to understand how those biases rank against each other.
TDS has a liberal bias to be sure, but that's not it's greatest bias. It's greatest bias is a mocking bias.
TV news has much less political bias, but it's the other biases that reaslly matter. Like TDS, TV news has to make a profit. But nobody would watch it if they didn't take it seriously. Safeguarding its legitimacy means not offending people and not rocking the boat too much. The result is so insipid that it would be unbearable to watch if they didn't throw in a little entertainment. But not entertainment that is so entertaining people forget that they're really serious.
This is where the epiphany hit me. The institution of the great daily newspaper is withering. TV news is so emasculated by its medium it is just plodding mindlessly through the motions. The Daily Show, whose primary bias is to mock, has accidentally stepped into the vacant role of the adversarial press. It takes great courage to speak truth to power. It takes great courage to tell people things they need to hear but which offend them. Unless, maybe, you do it with a smirk. Nobody wants to be poor sport.
It doesn't hurt that Jon Stewart has turned out to be one of the most interesting interviewers around. His selection of guests, if you took out the entertainment celebrities, would not be out of place for Jim Lehrer, except somehow I retain more from the Stewart interviews. Judged by the Fr. Sarducci five minute university test, only Terry Gross is better.
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:4, Insightful)
Until it sinks in.
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
Stewart sounds like a cynical libertarian to me, not a liberal. He'll readily decry the democrats when they go against his own idea of right and wrong, or when they act spineless, or when they suck up to the neo-cons. He'd fit right in on
The first paragraph you point out the conservatives who don't like Bush, but the second paragraph you make it seem like if Stewart doesn't like the Democrats, he must not be a liberal.
Most liberals I know are disappointed by the current batch of Democrat politicians, and are perfectly willing to vocalize their displeasure with the spinelessness and neo-con sucking-up. That doesn't necessarily make them Libertarians. Most of them will hold their nose and vote for the Democrat anyway, since the alternative is probably worse.
Hooray for American politics!
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Straight facts" are straight facts, and "obvious bias" is obvious bias.
Here's my take:
The only bit of journalism that is just "straight facts" is the police blotter (in newspapers that still have one). Everything else is written by someone who chooses words and phrases to evoke specific emotions and color the facts with their own bias. That doesn't necessarily imply the intent to deceive or spin or otherwise brainwash the reader. It's just a natural result of a writer conveying information to a reader.
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think people who have no idea what their political views are watch it, too. These people are a larger group than you [appear to] think.
Perhaps until he's been impeached?
Clinton was taken to court for a blowjob. Bush has illegally wiretapped citizens, his people have stolen two elections, including through illegal influence of supreme court justices. And he's sending our youth to die so that companies owned/controlled by his cronies can make money.
I think we need to hear it a few more times.
Re:Wouldn't it be better to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
Control the extremes (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
No one has mentioned Countdown (Score:2, Insightful)