The Daily Show as media watchdog
Written By: darien on June 12, 2009
8 Comments
This recent episode of The Daily Show really crystallizes everything that I’ve been saying about it since the beginning of the Obama presidency. For the past eight years, the show’s content was directed largely at criticizing the Bush presidency. And who can blame them? Those jokes wrote themselves.Now that the Bush administration is a thing of the past, however, the formula of the show has changed radically. What has emerged is a show that focuses primarily on tackling bias, sensationalism, misrepresentation, and conflict-of-interest in the media. It is teaching media literacy to an entire generation of Americans; a task that is both critically important in fostering an informed democracy, and completely ignored in conventional education. The show is as funny as ever and, in my opinion, more important and relevant than it has ever been in its entire thirteen years on the air.
More than any episode I’ve seen, I think this episode from June 8, 2009 drives this new focus home. In it, Stewart attacks FoxNews for pandering to the Right, MSNBC for pandering to the Left and to heavy-handed sponsors, and CNN for desperately trying to figure out just who they should be pandering to. Great episode.
Check it out:
Tags: daily show, jon stewart, media, media literacy, media watchdog, morning joe
Well, this episode has managed to promote the perception that Fox is heavily biased against Obama, misleads their audience with deceptive practices as in Hannity’s commentary and demonstrates a certain level of hypocrisy with the back to back clips of that newswoman. MSNBC is hostile to Limbaugh and CNN wants viewer feedback. Yeah, this is very enlightening.
The thing to note here is that while Stewart is making jokes about the media, real policy changes are happening that impact your life. Fox may lean right, but they do attempt to report those events they deem relevant to their viewers. You wouldn’t find out about stuff like this on MSNBC or CNN
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Whats-behind-Obamas-sudden-firing-of-the-AmeriCorps-inspector-general-47877797.html or even stuff like this http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aqLNecbH0dcg
I sincerely hope John Stewart isn’t the extent of your news source.
Oh and speaking of jokes that wrote themselves, this should’ve been great material for those late night funny guys who seemed to find every little misstep by Bush hilarious. Oddly enough, they didn’t see the humor in this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpGH02DtIws
Hi mom. The link I posted for ‘jokes wrote themselves’ involved the Vice President of the United States of America SHOOTING a 78 year old man in the FACE. Obama accidentally saying “57″ when he meant “47″ isn’t really on the same plane of funny.
You’re right about it not being on the same level of funny; I just don’t see the humor in a person being shot.