May 22, 2007
They’re getting things right Daily
Failure is always easier to lampoon than success, so it should be no surprise that Jon Stewart and his Daily Show cohorts so often take aim at Our Fine President. But it’s not the raw satire of our misguided media, or the cheap jokes at the expense of our constantly bumbling elected officials pushing the show to new levels of popularity and influence.
No the Daily Show occupies it’s current position of cultural prominence because Stewart and his contributors and correspondents are doing a very necessary job that’s been abdicated by the press as of late. They’ve been holding a mirror up to reality and showing that reflection to the audience with all the hypocrisy and outright fictions exposed. Sure they then turn around and use humor to highlight these flaws and childishly ridicule the people responsible for said flaws, but that doesn’t in any way reduce the power of the things they show, and besides, who doesn’t want to have childish fun again once in a while.
(before I go on too long I must mention that Stewart and Co. aren’t the only ones out there pulling off this sort of thing and I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that my hero Stephen Colbert is plenty good at this himself as he works from behind a deeper fog of satire, but more on him later…)
There’s been plenty of media coverage of The Daily Show’s rise as people have pondered what makes this show popular and can it be a reliable source of information while still being a comedy show? (The answers are good jokes and yes.) Now, American Journalism Review has published a lengthy investigation of the show titled What the Mainstream Media Can Learn from Jon Stewart. It’s a really long piece covering a number of issues, but I’m most interested in the basic concept of getting the media to provide accurate coverage, even if accuracy means a lack of balance.
The news business has been broken for a long time. Financial pressures and the 24-hour news cycle have fundamentally changed the industry from the inside, while advantageous ideologues poked at the media’s weaknesses and worked to subvert its effectiveness. We’ve now reached a point where a polarized public expects to only receive news they want to hear, and the people trying to profit from news are all to happy to serve up information to suit every taste.
Our media stopped asking questions and lost sight of their mission as the pursuit of accuracy was been subverted by this notion that balance means every story has two equally weighted sides. They became stenographers who never checked back on their tape to see if the latest dictation contradicted one from the past.
The Daily Show never got caught in this trap. If there’s tape to show someone fibbing they’ll put it on the air, then, if available they’ll go right to the footage of that person with his or her pants on fire. The media needs to do a whole lot more of that. Had they asked more questions and not been so easily manipulated for political purposes, the War in Iraq might have been averted.
Instead we’ve been treated to six years of rampant autocratic leadership, corruption and enough cronnyism on the national stage to make Chicago almost seem squeaky clean in comparison. Don’t get me wrong, the media was just as bad during the Clinton administration, but the stakes weren’t quite so high back then. But under Our Fine Current President, these press failures have caught more glare and brought disastrous consequences.
About the only good thing to come from the media and politics in the last six years was Colbert’s speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ dinner. There he grabbed the spotlight and gave Our Fine President a very personal verbal wag of the finger before turning on the press and holding them up to the light with lines like,
“Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president’s side, and the vice president’s side.
But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they’re super-depressing. And if that’s your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good — over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.
But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works: the president makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ‘em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!”
The Daily Show, Colbert and others have been there to point out the media’s failures while at the same time picking up the accuracies dropped by the real media for the last few years. The more people take notice of what they’re doing, the more the media looks that way for solutions to their many problems.
I just hope that they look past the humor and to the truths. There’s plenty to learn from what Jon Stewart gets right, but there’s lots of things he does that have no place in serious reporting. The news doesn’t need to be more irreverent, less conventional or slightly hilarious. It just needs to be true.