Nightline, Le Show, Daily Show

Slate has an interesting piece describing a conversation between Ted Koppel and Jon Stewart:

In a one-on-one chat on the deserted convention floor after the day's festivities had ended, Koppel, in his low-key, dignified, What-Me-Worry way, got medieval on Stewart's ass.

From the start, Koppel made no secret of his distaste for Stewart's show: "A lot of television viewers -- more, quite frankly, than I am comfortable with -- get their news from […] The Daily Show." His first challenge to Stewart: "You say that [the Democratic Convention] is like a product launch." "Not like a product launch – it is a product launch," Stewart replied, and proceeded to outline his take on Kerry's nomination as the result of a year-long process of corporate branding: "John Kerry: now with lemon!" A pretty standard line of argument for those of Stewart's generation, reconciled as we are to our postmodern condition as the constant targets of marketing and spin, but to Koppel, it must have sounded like the sheerest nihilism.

[...]

What was at stake in this debate between two men, a generation apart in age (Stewart is 42, Koppel 64), both of whom host some version of a late-night daily talk show on current events? Clearly, Koppel's beef went far beyond the question of whether most folks who watch The Daily Show do so for yuks. (As a long-term viewer, I would contend that of course they do, and that anyone who can't tell the difference between Stewart's out-there satire and actual investigative reporting is too dumb to understand the "real" news anyway.) No, the battle of the network anchors was about nothing less than the future of TV journalism.

Koppel, a venerable holdout from the era of the three-network system, stands up for the beleaguered notion of an objective truth that journalists can wrest from politicians, protect from satirists, and bring to the American public. Stewart, on the other hand, finds it "dispiriting" that broadcast news has become complicit with the pre-spun narratives coming from both left and right: "It's Coke and Pepsi talking about beverage truth." And yet Koppel is far from naïve – he quickly concedes that the convention-as-product-launch concept is "one I'd like to steal sometime" – and Stewart is no jaded Gen-X cynic. At one point, he even encourages Koppel to use the bully pulpit of Nightline to speak truth to power: "You can say, 'That's B.S.' You don't need humor, because you have what I wish I had, which is credibility and gravitas."

That last line is the most important. I watch The Daily Show because it's funny, first and foremost. But I watch The Daily Show religiously because, unlike any mainstream news outlet, there's a pretty good chance on any given night that Stewart or one of his co-conspirators will actually call bullshit on someone who deserves it. The same is true of Harry Shearer's Le Show, which is just as funny as the The Daily Show but far more vicious than Stewart will ever be.

The sad part is that while some portion of mainstream journalism requires actual investigatory work (and I'm grateful for those few national news reporters who seem to be practicing it) most of the major news outlets I'm aware of don't even bother to do the simplest possible comparison of what someone said or did in the past, and what they're saying or doing now, or try to distinguish talking points and spin from actual news or even just actual truth. The Daily Show actually does that (Remember "Mr. Cheney, your pants are on fire," and Stewart's brilliant bit on talking points?) So does Le Show. So do a fair number of bloggers (I try, within my limited abilities).

The even sadder part is that it would usually take only a search of any given news organization's own archives to do all of those things in the course of writing a piece. Most of the time, bloggers can do them with a Google search of publicly available information. Yet most of the news I read (and I read a lot) doesn't bother -- delivering only today's news (often only today's pasteurized news food product) without even an attempt to compare it to yesterday's news, so that the public can evaluate their government's track record for, say, truth and/or consistency. That's actually pathetic, not just sad.

The bottom line is that huge portions of the straight news infrastructure are completely broken, at least when it comes to national government, political, and economic coverage. The straight news consistently fails to deliver context and enough independent analysis, dishing up partisan spin and ahistorical news-of-the-day.

Is it any wonder that people, especially young people, who have been spun, sold, focus-grouped, and demographicized our entire lives, would give up on Koppel's colleagues, who are so plainly complicit in our exploitation, and turn to Stewart? Koppel's beef with Stewart is misplaced. If the straight news were better, Stewart wouldn't look nearly as useful to so many people.

Comments

[bigring55t]

Couldn't agree more. The slow inevitable slide into obsolescence by what is left of mainstream media has been accelerated by the increased emphasis on profit. and a shifting of paradigm from investigatory to revelatory( i.e. from is what they said a fact to the fact is what they said). Nevertheless, there is currently no structure in place that can take over for the reach of the mainstream media, as the Daily show and bloggers all operate at the meta level, under the assumption that differential analysis still allows signal to be isolated from noise. Without some replacement for info gathering in place, the best that can be hoped for is better access to the BBC and Guardian.

[DJW]

Spot on. Excellent post.

[paperwight]

Thanks, both of you. I'm just slugging away over in my small corner of the media tent.