Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News | Hacker News Reader

Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News

npr.org

35 pointsjonmc1211 comments

In TFA, Brian Williams mentions Stewart's takedown of Cramer in an interview in which 'the odds were stacked against Jim Cramer'.

This brought to mind a brilliant attack on the now defunct political show "Crossfire", in which Liberals battled Conservatives. In a nutshell, Stewart was brought on as a guest after attacking Crossfire on The Daily Show. Although Stewart is the guest on the show, he takes the offensive and puts the Crossfire hosts at an instant disadvantage. Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE

The odds were stacked against the hosts. Cause you know, they are dumb and partisan hacks pretending to be fair under the disguise of a talk show. One of those idiots, Tucker Carlson, never bounced back and lost his job.

I guess I don't know what you mean by "never bounced back". Tucker Carlson hosted a show on MSNBC called "Tucker" for multiple years after Crossfire's cancellation, until around the end of 2008 iirc. I think if you get your _own_ TV show, and it runs for a few years, that's "bouncing back".

Both of his shows got cancelled. Hence, never bounced back. When you get demoted from a show host to a "panelist", that's not bouncing back. Its like Conan O' Brian doing stand-up gigs after leaving The Tonight Show.

Well, at some point that happens to everyone. I think he bounced back, but was dropped again. "bounce back" doesn't have to be permanent; it's not like Tucker never received momentum, it ran for almost three years, which is longer than a lot of shows on cable news.

What more and more people have been discovering in the modern age of openness and availability is that much of what we once thought of as serious institutions (televised and written news, for example) are far more style than substance.

The Daily Show's critiques of modern journalism are so devastating because, despite being a fly by night fake news organization with comedy as their main goal, somehow they manage to put on a news show that is nearly as substantive as the competition, merely by accident. And that's due to the fact that in news these days there really isn't much there there. Once you boil away all the high-gloss production values and the special access and the fame and the reputation you find out that at its core there is very little legitimate, original reporting work being done in the mainstream media. Which is understandable, because the big media companies learned long ago that hard journalism is difficult business, costly, and sometimes hard to sell to the viewing public. But the rate of return on glossy production values, infotainment, and pseudogravitas is through the roof.

But these tricks are approaching the limit of their shelf life. The big TV and print news organizations aren't attracting new, young viewers, their viewership has been getting old, and dwindling. They are rapidly approaching becoming inconsequential and that has as much to do with folks like Jon Stewart pulling up the stakes of their circus tent as it does with technology passing them by.

One of the commenters makes an interesting point: is Jon Stewart doing what he does because he believes in journalistic integrity, or because he's an entertainer and this is just an act?

I hope for the former, I really do. Maybe I'm not cynical enough.

There is no author, only a text.

If Jon Stewart acts like a media critic and promotes integrity in journalism, his motivation is an implementation detail.

Asking if it is all just an act is an easy way not to meet the argument. This is why the "real" media call him a comedian or entertainer. His criticism is not crucial to them, it's all peripheral issues.

If on the other hand the goal is to put him on a pedestal or judge him, his mental states might be relevant.

I suspect it began as the later, and the former crept in while they weren't paying attention. If you look at the early shows they didn't give anywhere near the time to current events and politics as recent ones do.

Whats the point of writing jokes when news organizations and politicians does it for?

I suspect the editors of the Daily Show has a pretty easy job. It shouldn't be that hard to find materials with the amount of farce available from news organizations and so called journalists.

TV news is a joke with partisan hacks caring more about supporting their team (left or right) as opposed to reporting the news.

Thankfully, I disconnected my cable about 1 year ago (right after the election).

Times are better spent reading books, if I care about any interesting TV shows I can watch it on hulu. Its amazing how muh free time you have when you don't have cable anymore.

Brian Williams is bad for news.

Remember his coming out party? Hurricane Kartina? Remember when he said he didn't know how he would answer his daughters questions about why the government was so racist? I wonder what he ever figured out...

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