Long live the jesters!
I was disappointed that The Daily Show was not back last night, tonight’s the night. Jon Stewart is in Denver covering the convention.
Yesterday Jon held a laid-back breakfast get-together with twenty or so of the most accomplished and respected political journalists in print journalism and asked -- "Why do I take this more seriously than you?"
These journalists work for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, The Associated Press and other heavy-hitter news organizations.
Jon told the reporters that Fox's fair-and-balanced slogan is an insult "to people with brains"...and that if Obama cured cancer Fox News would find a way to mock it.
"DENVER, Aug. 25 -- Jon Stewart ripped the cable news networks Monday as a "brutish, slow-witted beast" and castigated Fox News in particular as "an appendage of the Republican Party."
Wearing a gray T-shirt, khaki pants and a healthy stubble, the "Daily Show" host told reporters at a University of Denver breakfast that Fox's "fair and balanced" slogan is an insult "to people with brains" and that only "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace "saves that network from slapping on a bumper sticker. . . . Barack Obama could cure cancer and they'd figure out a way to frame it as an economic disaster."
"I'm stunned to see Karl Rove on a news network as an analyst," he said of the Bush White House aide turned Fox commentator. Stewart, who voted for John Kerry in 2004, said he didn't see CNN's James Carville, the former Bill Clinton aide, in the same category because "I don't think he's being passed off as a sage."
....Stewart included CNN and MSNBC in a far-ranging indictment of what he called "that false sense of urgency they create, the sense that everything is breaking news. . . . The 24-hour networks are now driving the narratives and everyone else is playing catch-up." [..]
Is it any wonder that thinking people get their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert...two comedians who have more journalistic insights than a whole roomful of "real news" reporters.
If only the journalists on the cable networks would heed his advice. I like remembering when he tore new ones for Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson on Crossfire four years ago for what a worthless circus it had become.
He must have hit a nerve because shortly after that a CNN executive canceled the show.
I loved it when he called Tucker a dick to his face. My sentiments exactly.
Many people think the Fourth Estate is largely responsible for allowing the White House to operate without oversight for eight years...while the media did 24/7 coverage of the search for missing young blond girls, and followed Anna Nicole, Paris and Britney around like the second coming.
They pursue the trivial and ignore the complex. But it's not all their fault, the ratings for lurid sensationalism far outshine serious reporting.
With the exception of C-SPAN, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Washington Week with Gwen Ifil, Frontline, Now, and maybe a few others on PBS, the last time the "news" networks simply delivered facts without personal commentary was back in the 1980's.
The only way to solve the lazy news problem, at least during the convention, is to watch CSPAN. From the opening to the closing -- 6 hours -- there was not one bloviating talking head. And no commercials...just the convention, nothing else. How refreshing.
Theoretically we have a free and open press...but we have sold our airwaves to corporations that are distorting the news, mixing it in with entertainment, instead of giving us "fair and balanced" reporting.
The results of a recent Pew Survey on News Consumption says "that viewers of the “fake news” programs "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" are more knowledgeable about current events than watchers of “real” cable news shows hosted by Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly and Larry King, among others -- as well as average consumers of NBC, ABC, Fox News, CNN, C-SPAN and daily newspapers."
Who woulda thunk that comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would become better at reporting the news than the actual news people?
Folks, we are now in Bizarro World....
