The News We Get
I am still thinking about the information we get and how to think critically about it. After reading the lead stories I love to go to The Daily Show on Comedy Central and get Jon Stewart’s satiric take.
“Stewart and his team often seem to steer closer to the truth than traditional journalists. The Daily Show satirizes spin, punctures pretense and belittles bombast. When a video clip reveals a politician’s backpedaling, verbal contortions or mindless prattle, Stewart can state the obvious — ridiculing such blather as it deserves to be ridiculed — or remain silent but speak volumes merely by arching an eyebrow.” This from an article entitled “What The Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart” by Rachel Smolkin in American Journal Review. Read the rest of the article here.
More from the article: “A colleague says that “one thing he [Jon Stewart] does do is fact-checking: If somebody says, ‘I never said that,’ and next thing you know, there’s a clip of the same guy three months ago saying exactly that, that’s great fact-checking,” and a great lesson for journalists.
Phil Rosenthal, the Chicago Tribune’s media columnist, thinks part of the reason “The Daily Show” and its spinoff, “The Colbert Report,” resonate is that they parody not only news but also how journalists get news…He adds that “so much of the news these days involves managing the news, so a show like Stewart’s that takes the larger view of not just what’s going on, but how it’s being manipulated, is really effective. I think there’s a general skepticism about the process that this plays into… The wink isn’t so much we know what’s really going on. The wink is also we know you know what we’re doing here.
A 2004 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 21 percent of people age 18 to 29 cited comedy shows such as “The Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live” as places where they regularly learned presidential campaign news, nearly equal to the 23 percent who regularly learned something from the nightly network news or from daily newspapers.
Even if they did learn from his show, a more recent study indicates Stewart’s viewers are well-informed. An April 15 Pew survey gauging Americans’ knowledge of national and international affairs found that 54 percent of regular viewers of “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” scored in the high-knowledge category, tying with regular readers of newspaper Web sites and edging regular watchers of “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” Overall, 35 percent of people surveyed scored in the high-knowledge category.”
And what percentage of the U.S. population reads any news at all? And which of these don’t read the news because they have just given up trusting it?
Tags: News, Reflections, USA
Zoe
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