Jon Stewart continues to break stories the "real" media can't -- or won't
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Jon Stewart continues to break stories the "real" media can't -- or won't
Earlier this year, I wrote a post about "fake newscaster"/comedian Jon Stewart and his epic "Daily Show" takedown of bogus business reporting and misleading hype on the business news channel CNBC, and I wondered why it took someone like Stewart to report what the mainstream media seemed unable or unwilling to tackle. I said there were valuable lessons for traditional, so-called "serious" media in Stewart's brand of -- dare I say it -- journalism. I advised my newsroom colleagues:
Tear down this wall...of pretending that the media itself isn't a major player in American society, and isn't a factor in most big stories. Sure, there were greedy bankers and their pocketed politicians working in unintended tandem to take the Dow from 14,000 down to 6,600, but these popular TV pundits were there every step of the way, as "The Daily Show" revealed, and their contribution was consequential. Mainstream media, after all these years, has a hard time understanding that one of the major political forces in this country is mainstream media, something the audience knows all too well.
This week, Stewart is on the case again, with a scoop that the thousands of journalists working in traditional newsrooms missed. Granted, this time it's more of a quick "gotcha," than a detailed takedown like the CNBC piece was, but it was still a story well worth reporting. It involved some creative editing on the "Hannity" program on the Fox News Channel:
Jon Stewart, the host of “The Daily Show,” presented excerpts from a segment of Mr. Hannity’s show in which he discussed the so-called tea party protests in Congress last Thursday with Representative Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota who had urged supporters to turn up at the Capitol to protest the health care bill.
Beyond questioning the crowd estimates cited by Mr. Hannity, Mr. Stewart demonstrated that the Fox News program had included several scenes of the crowd, one of which he conclusively proved had not been shot the day of the health care protest but at the much larger tea party protest in Washington last summer.
Sean Hannity apologized on the air tonight, claiming the error was "inadvertent." That's hard to believe. It's a significant story because Jon Stewart understood something that many high-ranking traditional media editors still, sadly, do not understand.
That this kind of thing matters.
A lot.
For Fox News, which has stepped up its partisan cheerleading for the right wing since Barack Obama became president, size -- of anti-administration protests, that is -- does matter. And when they run misleading footage to make a conservative rally appear to be much, much better attended than it really was, that accomplishes several things. It fires up the right-wing base -- the people that GOP wants to get rowdy at town hall meetings or flood congressional phone lines. And the bogus report also pressures wavering lawmakers, especially those centrist Democrats looking for any excuse not to support health care reform. Using doctored footage to make a point is not news. It's propaganda, and in America that makes it a serious matter, indeed.
Not in most newsrooms. Most editors probably wouldn't say it exactly this way, but the truth is that we see ourselves as actors who don't want to tear down that imaginary "fourth wall" between ourselves and the audience, any more than they do on Broadway. But we're not Broadway; the media is itself a major player in the American body politic, often shaping outcomes by the way we frame important issues. One of the main reasons that political blogs became so prominent a few years back was a willingness to break stories about the media -- two early examples leaping to mind were the Dan Rather scandal (on the right) and the Jeff Gannon scandal (on the left) -- in a way that the traditional media itself didn't feel comfortable with.
And Jon Stewart and his outstanding team of "Daily Show" producers and writers not only "get" the importance of media manipulation and propaganda, but they can take it a step farther because they also have something that most bloggers do not --resources. Their access to large film libraries is what helps them to take down Fox, CNBC, and all the other media types (and politicians, too) when they say the polar opposite of what they were saying a year ago or even a month ago.
You know who else has those kinds of resources? Mainstream, big media newsrooms. But big media pathologically refuses to think of itself as a part of the national narrative, even as the millions of people who watch Jon Stewart or read your top political blogs know better. And until we in the old media can comprehend that, the new media will continue to leave us in the dust. So will the "fake" media.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Sean Hannity Uses Glenn Beck's Protest Footage | ||||
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There's no excuse for it. But we shouldn't get into a "Well, they did it first", argument. The problem is that Will is physically unable to point out the equally glaring instances of hypocrisy from other mainstream media sources, which causes the conservatives on this blog to try to justify what Fox did. There is no justification. Had Will pointed out the 100's of other examples of the exact same behavior, all of us would have agreed that the media overall distorts and tries to shape our thinking, some in more insidious ways then others. Instead, Will contributes to the "us vs. them" philosophy. Have you ever seen coverage on NBC10/ABC6/FOX29/CBS3 where they say "Dozens of protesters were on hand...." and the screen shot is so tight that you can barely see 3 people? This cr&p happens all the time, and it's not right, and it's not journalism -- there is no integrity in journalism today, and that especially includes Will.— IggleFan68
"fraudulently inflating the numbers at an event that has already happened, is equivalent to someone estimating different potential crowd sizes at an event that hasn't even happened yet? Hilarious." GEE TPS I don't know if I would call them equivalent?? Your example is a news outlet that is as biased as all the others just in the opposite direction of your POV while the other is a sitting U.S. Senator changing estimates indiscriminately in an attempt to influence federal legislation and local statutes - is that equivalent???? But you know accurate crowd estimates are extremely important and no one should ever over or under estimate them for political purposes. I'll continue later but right now you have a call on line 2 from Minister Farrakhan.— bird11- The leftist liberals are out in force over this Stewart show, doing their best impression of Snoppy's happy feet dance.— jeandarc
- Shorter Iggy = "Fox News was bad, but mommy, mommy, they did it first."— Talking point sleuth
- IggleFan68 - dead on. The news today is slanted more than the criminals hideout in the Batman TV series. The offensive part in Bunch's post to me isn't his outrage but his belief that the news media should be doing more of it "But we're not Broadway; the media is itself a major player in the American body politic, often shaping outcomes by the way we frame important issues." Of course Bunch is only comfortable if this shaping is coming from a lberal left media.— bird11
- Has any ARt ever, ever, learned any rhetorical techniques more advanced than "Mommy, mommy, they did it first?" Is reading Attytood some media project for some 4th grade classroom, and all our beloved ARts are students in Mrs. Smith's class?— Talking point sleuth
Comment removed.- Comment removed.
- Fox News Lied Really!!!!! Say it ain't so!— cuso20
- TPS -- I disagree. My point was that Will is intentionally rabble-rousing by only pointing out one "side's" misbehavior. Read carefully, at no point in my post did I justify what Fox did. And I also specifically stated that we shouldn't get into an argument over who did what first because it's pointless. The larger, more important, more INTERESTING discussion/argument is that our media outlets try to subvert and control the "news" to direct the political outcomes in this country.— IggleFan68
- Today's headline Business Section: "Jobless claims fall more than expected to 502K" buried in paragraph 10 is "The unemployment rate jumped to 10.2 percent in October, the Labor Department said last week, as employers cut a net total of 190,000 jobs. That's the highest jobless rate in 26 years." Now is this bias?? The headline is the one bit of good news out of the current jobless numbers. We can never know but would the headline be "HIGHEST JOBLESS RATE IN 26 YEARS" if the President had a (R) after his name??? Seems from what Bunch is saying that would be fine because "the media is itself a major player in the American body politic, often shaping outcomes by the way we frame important issues."— bird11
- Personally, I'd prefer more in depth reporting on the awful accounting of the stimulus' magic job saving/creating powers.— RG
- Comment removed.
- Stewart's outing of Fox's BS was shocking. It confirms Fox is, was, and always will be, nothing but a propaganda machine for republican right wing zealots. Can any intelligent person ever again trust anything they say? Just the silence of the right wing idiots that post here is testament.— Ron
- Comment removed.
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