All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Is the campaign trail getting a tad easier with the absence of the “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report?”

In my listening to the “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” replay on XM radio yesterday, I heard one of his panelists making that observation. Her argument being basically that ‘if Jon Stewart had been around, the Clinton campaign wouldn’t have gotten away with the Barack/kindergarten letter story.’

For a moment it sounded silly, like a child saying ‘Ooooh, it’s a good thing mom didn’t see you,’ but then I realized that the panelist’s observation had the added quality of being … true.

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When life gives you lemon, you make lemonade.

And when a writer’s strike shuts down TV, media types try to douse reality with sugar water and look at the bright side, too.

How else to explain two recent pieces about hoiw MediaLand residents are making do without current episodes of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report?”

According to Slate:

A Grey's Anatomy rerun is a bummer only if you've already seen that episode, a Daily Show rerun is the television equivalent of a day-old newspaper. It's birdcage liner.

A five-year-old episode of The Daily Show, on the other hand, is pure gold.

And a piece in this week’s Boston Phoenix tries to suggest that not even the writer’s strike can stop the force of nature named Stephen Colbert:

In fact, Colbert has reached such revered status at this juncture that even in a period of relative inactivity — not doing a show, not running for president — people are talking about him, wondering about him, and waiting for his next move.

Really? Are you spending time pondering Colbert, talking about him and wondering about him?
Yeah. Me neither.

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Okay, first things first: This space is going to be a ‘cackle’-free zone. No poking fun at irrelevant personal characteristics or foibles. At least not this week. That's why this writer didn't pick up on the “Chucklegate” story yesterday, which referenced “The Daily Show” and Jon Stewart. I’m just not going there.

But that doesn’t mean Stewart’s off-limits altogether, right? Last night, Jon Stewart had one of his best jousts with a TV talking head since the immortal “Crossfire” “I’m not going to be your monkey” segment where he slashed and burned the cable news argumentation format.

His guest was MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Chris Matthews, who was on to plug his new book “Life is a Campaign.”

It was a gleeful wincefest, with Stewart himself lapsing on a few occasions into some weird cringe posture at his interview desk. The segment even began awkwardly, as Matthews walked on-set with his arms crossed, and some godawful synthesizer music played that made me think I was watching an ‘80s game show like “Card Sharks.” (Pat Gavin slapped the video of the segment up on DCFishbowl, if you’re not in a reading mood.)

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The Information Revolution – Fought To a Draw:

Wired magazine reported on a study suggesting that us Americans aren’t a whole lot more up on current events than we were back in 1989.

More than a decade after the Internet went mainstream, the world's richest information source hasn't necessarily made its users any more informed. A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that Americans, on average, are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989.

While it’s surprising to us that Americans can’t name Vice President Dick Cheney as readily as people used to know Vice President Dan Quayle, in Americans defense we’re more aware of political facts like “Who is the Speaker of the House?” and “Is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court conservative, moderate or liberal?”

And sure, “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” viewers score higher than CNN and Fox News viewers, but they didn’t even ask Public Eye readers. We know you’d ace the quiz.

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First things first: I love “The Daily Show.” And, truth be told, I love “The Colbert Report” even more. They’re addictive, clever and the bleeding edge of political satire.

All that being said, it’s time to set the record straight on Jon Stewart’s night-time fun house.

For years, the “Daily Show” has been put forward as The New Information Source. It’s a sexy and fun topic, and there are actual data supporting the claim. This past weekend, Gail Shister – the artist formerly known as a top-notch media writer until her paper ‘reassigned’ her – wrote the most recent story looking at how viewers ages 18-29 increasingly are using “The Daily Show” as their news outlet of choice. This is a tempting and fun story to write since the tell-tale numbers are provided by the unimpeachable Pew Research Center for People and the Press. And the numbers don’t lie. She writes:

Politically, The Daily Show is no joke.

According to a Pew Research Center study, one in five 18-to-29-year-olds reported regularly getting news about the 2004 presidential campaign from late-night comedy shows - up 12 percent over the 2000 race.

In addition the 2004 study – we’ll call it Exhibit A -- she also tosses in a stat from this year’s study (Exhibit B), showing 13 percent of “Gen Nexters” report watching the show regularly.

There you have it. "The Daily Show” = source of news for young people, who feel disenchanted with the mainstream media. Case closed, right?

Not so fast. If you take a closer look at Exhibit A, there is also a table where the Pew people quizzed participants on “Where They Learn and How Much They Know.” As a part of the poll, which was conducted in late 2003 when people were more familiar with the Democratic candidates, people were asked which of them was a former House Majority Leader (Dick Gephardt) and which was a former Army General (Wesley Clark). And in a field of 18 genres of news outlets – from NPR to Sunday talk shows to cable TV — the participants who said they get their news from comedy shows such as “The Daily Show” or “Saturday Night Live” scored next to last.

Shister closes her piece with a “Daily Show” executive comparing the show to a pizza with spinach because, hey, you still get the important stuff, right? But the truth is that the “Daily Show” is actually just a nice dessert or digestif, after a meal of Real News Roughage.

This isn't right in our media criticism wheelhouse, but I found Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria's comments on last night's "Daily Show" worth thinking about. And since Comedy Central has made video of the interview available online, I thought I'd point you in that direction. Part one of the interview is here; part two is here. (You have to watch an ad first.)

Most memorable comments from Zakaria? For my money it's what he said after Jon Stewart noted that the White House is "making a big show," in the wake of the Iraq Study Group Report, of President Bush sitting down with people to talk about how to deal with Iraq:

This might all be a show. Because I think at the end of the day Bush may be the last neoconservative in office. I mean, he, seems to me, to truly believe that this Iraq thing – it's not just a great idea, but it's actually working. If you look outside Baghdad, things are much better than they are. We just need to get through this hump, convince the American people just to hang in there, and it's all going to work out. In other words, all these consultations, I think it may well be a charade. He just wants to double down.

Responds Stewart, incredulous: What? Video here.

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Jon Stewart, and most things “Daily Show”-related, are catnip for the media. Stewart’s 2004 assault on CNN’s “Crossfire” was big news. And the apparently substantial influence that “The Daily Show” has over the news consuming habits of our nation’s youth (the kids, the young people) is always a notable topic. A study this summer on “The Daily Show Effect,” which suggested that the program contributes to college students’ cynicism about politics, generated fair amount of buzz. A study two years earlier, which revealed that almost a quarter of people 18-29 got the bulk of their political campaign news from "The Daily Show" and "Saturday Night Live," also had everyone in a tizzy.

The latest Stewart study to gain headlines hasn’t even been published yet, but a press release is out for an Indiana University study (to be published next summer by the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media) that says news coverage on “The Daily Show” is as substantive as that of the network news broadcasts. Naturally, it’s getting some attention already. “While much has been written in the media about The Daily Show's impact,” says the release, “[Assistant Professor of Telecommunications Julia R.] 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.”

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