Unbelievable? You bet! Here's your Fox News: See, on Bill O'Reilly's Nothing But Spin Zone, they simply turned Mark Foley into a Democrat, even though he's a Republican. Who cares about basic facts? Hey, the Fox slogan doesn't say anything about being "accurate."
I'm supposed to be "on vacation" this week, but this was just too good. People are always complaining about studies that simply "prove" the obvious, but in-depth studies and analysis are absolutely needed in a country where majorities of people believe things that are factually wrong (say, that Saddam did indeed have WMDs) or disbelieve things that have long ago been demostrated to be true (say, evolution). So, here comes a journalism study from Indiana University that finds news coverage on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" is as substantive as network news. The only part of this I question is the word "as." It should be "more." If you don't read newspapers and listen to NPR, you might not even understand what's being satirized on "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report." If you got most of your news from network evening newscasts, you wouldn't know what the hell was going on. (See this transcript from a recent Katie Couric CBS Evening Gossipcast, posted on the blog of a prominent conservative.)
No, Stewart and Colbert may claim to be the "fake news," but they are firmly rooted in the "reality-based community" -- and provide more incisive cut-through-the-bull analysis of current events than anything on commercial television. (Only "Frontline" goes deeper -- the show that, as at least one TV critic pointed out earlier this week, would have told the powers in the White House and the Pentagon and the intelligence community the things they needed to know, but now claim they didn't, if they'd only bothered to watch it. It's on PBS, Condi!)
From the official announcement of the "Daily Show" study, to be published in the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media, published by the Broadcast Education Association:
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Which would you think has more substantive news coverage -- traditional broadcast network newscasts or "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart"?Would you believe the answer is neither?
Julia R. Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University isn't joking when she says the popular "fake news" program, which last week featured Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as a guest, is just as substantive as network coverage.
While much has been written in the media about "The Daily Show"'s impact, Fox's study is the first scholarly effort to systematically examine how the comedy program compares to traditional television news as sources of political information.
The study, "No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart' and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign," will be published next summer...
I think some of The Daily Show's finest moments have emerged with this whole Foley scandal (the IM popping up on the screen during Stewart's opening had me nearly fall out of my chair). The lack of consciousness, of moral and intellectual accountability, of SENTIENCE in this country is so abominational lately that sometimes all one can do is laugh (lest we break down and cry). Jon Stewart's response to that particular Fox bit - so handily switching Mr. Foley over the the Democrats - was brilliant; a completely unethusiastic, obligatory applause. It's as if, for lack of any alternative, we simply have to applaud them for lowering the standards to such depths.
i've only started watching the daily show and colbert report recently (not because i didn't like them, but because i just had never gotten around to it) and, even though i'd heard they were great, was shocked to see just how good they were. not only are they consistantly hilarious every night, but their analysis is, as has been said, spot on and razor sharp. i can't help but think about htose preposterous "Scarborough country" spots where they ask if the daily show is ruining democracy, both for their mind blowing inanity and the questions they ask, like "why do young people watch this (as they call it) garbage?"
the simple and wonderful answer is that not only are they funny, but because in a world where no one knows what to believe young people feel like they finally have someplace to go that isn't bullshitting them.
I remember watching the Daily Show a few years ago when Dick Cheney had given a long, in-depth interview to someone to answer all the charges that had been piling up against him at the time (I'm sorry I can't remember more of the specifics of this particular case). They ran clips from the interview in which the interviewer asked Cheney about things he had said in the past to which Cheney replied by denying he had ever said such things. They then cut to clips from the past that showed Cheney saying exactly those things. Then they cut to Jon Stewart looking into the camera with his jaw on the ground.
After they had done this, like, 4-5 times, I thought to myself, "You know, I'm not going to see this on any other news show."
That's all I have to say.
JE: It's true. Immediately after 9/11, and through the invasion of Iraq, the mainstream press repeatedly reported things known to be untrue, just because someone in the administration had said them (or denied them) -- with no reference to verifiable reality or things these same people had said in the past. For a while I thought perhaps "The Daily Show" was the only American news organization with a memory -- and access to a video news library of some sort. According to TPM, NBC, PBS, CNN and other network newscasts are now doing the very same thing with the Republicans' false claims about Mark Foley:
Will you?
TPM Reader MW just sent us in this email ...
On CNN and in the Washington Post yesterday, reporters duly noted that the Republicans who are parrotting this argument do so with no evidence and that there's no evidence to back it up.But this is insufficient.
Every news organization that is aggressively reporting this story knows in basic outlines who the ultimate sources of these IMs were and how they made their way into the hands of the media. So they know not only that there is 'no evidence' for the GOP line but that it is actually false. Given that the Republicans who are spouting this line make no effort even to offer evidence, I think it is a fair conclusion that not only is the claim false but that these professional bamboozlers like Gingrich know it's false.
In other words, they're lying. And the news organizations publishing what they say know they're lying.
Saying there's 'no evidence' doesn't cut.
-- Josh Marshallhttp://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/010226.php
D-Foley? It's a typo. It hasn't happened before but it supports your paranoia, therefore it must be part of a plot to get Democrats. Please--there's an argument to be made against Fox, but building it around a typo simply is not it.
I'm Hungarian, and I was absolutely blown away how The Colbert Report reacted to the M0 Bridge (or in Colbert's wonderful Hungarian, 'Hid') naming poll. Most of the Hungarian just shrugged at how incompetent our government was to announce the poll as an online voting, but Colbert showed us and the world, how utterly absurd it is. It literally made my jaw drop when we made Colbert headlines, because apart from some independent press in Hungary, noone picked up how ridiculous it was.
I wish I could remember who did the study, but before the 2004 election, someone did a study and found that Daily Show viewers were way more likely to be college educated and knew a lot more about the issues than O'Reilly viewers. Personally, I think O'Reilly is pretty funny when he says "no spin" and then immediately spins a story into a total lie.
I spend many evenings searching through the vault of clips on youtube for past Daily Show and Colbert segments.
I remember watching the Daily Show when what's his face was head of it, and he still asked the five questions to each guest on the show. My has this show come a long way: from complete popcorn irrelevance to the most relevant I've ever seen on television. Bravo to John Stewart and his crew, and Comedy Central for allowing them to steer away from the frat boy crowd.
I've got to disagree with Mike, the poster above. First of all, I think there's enough tangible, real, and easily sourcable information to suggest that our fears regarding news organizations such as Fox are indeed more substantial than your average paranoia. Secondly, the way I see it, when it comes to something as big as Fox, with its many employees who are meant to oversee EVERYTHING that is done, whatever is shown on screen is what was meant to be shown. A mistake that blatant simply shouldn't be, and - think fast - when was the last time you saw such a type? Did it just happen to occur at a time when the Republicans were soiling themselves? The only way I'd be convinced it was a typo was if they came out and apologized for their faulty representation, but then again, that would start a domino effect of necassary apologies, and the whole channel would implode on itself.
Mike, you should see the "Daily Show" segment that led up to the showing of this "typo" (I put it in quotation marks because I don't know if that's what it was or not.) What makes it so funny is that Fox was full of comments from Brit Hume and Sean Hannity and others who were (and ARE) trying to somehow blame the Foley cover-up on the Democrats (even though their arguments don't make any sense and are easily disproved). Indeed, Newt Gingrich and others are out there selling those very talking points on all networks -- and the more they repeat them, without being contradicted by reporters and anchors who know better, the more people will believe what they say. So, maybe it's just a funny coincidence that "D-FLA" showed up on Fox -- in ironic confirmation of the network's personalities' pre-existing rhetoric. Or maybe it was just a typo. Or maybe the poor intern who prepares the onscreen text & graphics just got confused (and misinformed) by watching Fox News and made an honest mistake!
I didn't know people still used the term "reality-based community" with a straight face.
Humor, by necessity, plays off biases. I know some people want to pat themselves on the back for how smart they are for watching a comedy show, but grow up.