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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Shows using the format where they do an interview and then selectively air parts of it rather than the whole thing. In general The Daily Show and its offspring -- not the interviews that happen in front of the audience in the studio, the ones for the pre-recorded segments.

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Have you seen this show at all? It generally dedicates the bulk of its episode to a single story and goes in depth. Not saying this can't be happening, and there's always going to be stuff left out in even a 30 minute timeframe, but it tries to educate on the "complete picture" with nuanced points on a single issue per ep

With going in depth you mean:

1. Continuously make fun of superficial attributes and mannerisms

2. Selectively present a biased narrative without opposition

3. Push said narrative with ad hominem attacks and jokes about someones' appearance

Even when I agree with the narrative, the mechanisms by which the audience is persuaded feels quite disingenuous to me. Look at the episodes he did about Trump in 2016, the host spends half the time making fun of small hands, when you could fill hours with Trump's fascism. My perspective is based on episodes I watched in 2016. The small bits I've seen from him and other similar formats since then suggest it is still this way.

It is a comedy show after all. One that tackles very serious subjects in ahumerous way. Doesn make the reporting wrong.

And, this show in particular, gets the fact right almost all of the time. And it provided more context and details on the whole Boeing saga than any other news source I have seen or read so far since the door plug blew out. Heck, going back to the 737 Max crashes I would be hard pushed to find main stream media reporting that was, factually and regarding context, better.

The thing that irked me was the mechanism by which it seemed people were convinced. It could be used to push whatever viewpoint they want to push. While it is a comedy show, they do a for the rest of the industry embarrassingly thorough job of investigating topics. So that puts a lot of responsibility on them.

> mechanism by which it seemed people were convinced

If not humor, what mechanism would you prefer?

Yeah, it's a formulaic, juvenile approach, hard to watch more than a little without feeling empty and exhausted. The research seems very solid, but the tone is shallow and teeters on the edge of Fox News-style partisan ragebaiting.

They're not making fun of Trumps small hands, they're making fun of his belief that hand size is important. So it's not an attack on their appearance.

Thanks! This whole Trumps hand size thing was started by Trump himself.

Speaking as a person with an amazing ability to offend and alienate folks on both sides of the political spectrum.

I like it when John Oliver or whoever goes after corruption and incompetence, but it still has to be said that popular comedy news shows are kind of the left’s version of Fox News in terms of shrillness, pandering, and brainwashing. While episodes on many topics are cringey to watch, at least they aren’t completely post-truth yet. When the writers do wade all the way in to culture war nonsense, I think they do this with a certain self awareness and I like to think they feel bad about it.

It would be easier to tolerate bias or low-brow ad hominem in comedy news if it wasn’t also still better than most “real” news. I don’t really want to hold a comedian to a journalist’s standard, but the real question is where are the journalists at anyway?

NPR (my old favorite) has jumped the shark. Other outlets generally harass me with paywalls when I’m already forced to sift through a total shit show of a website with op Ed’s no one asked for, celebrity gossip, and lengthy gpt-powered regurgitation all fluffing up the same few short blurbs from the AP wire.

Mainstream media for both the left and the right, domestic and foreign, all have websites with ads like “free WiFi for senior citizens” and “Just add this one weird thing to your toothpaste” next to big brain articles about dealing with disinformation in the next round of elections.

None of this is very confidence inspiring, so no, I doubt they’ll sell many subscriptions, and yeah, I expect quality will continue to decline. So I guess comedian-journalism is probably here to stay, regardless of whether I like the format

> It would be easier to tolerate bias or low-brow ad hominem in comedy news if it wasn’t also still better than most “real” news. I don’t really want to hold a comedian to a journalist’s standard, but the real question is where are the journalists at anyway?

The journalists are in the same boat as the engineers at Boeing: being held hostage by MBAs management at the behest of shareholders.

Can we please stopping the cringe-meme of blaming MBAs? I assure you, engineers are just as prone to fall for greed and being unethical and sycophantic as MBAs, doctors, journalists or software engineers.

The MBAs trying to keep old media afloat are held hostage by shareholders who don't even watch the product. The general public has become increasingly less willing to spend any amount of time (eyes on ads) or money (subscriptions) on broadcast and print journalism. A whole generation of consumers has grown up on ad-free content and cannot fathom how the business model worked so well, pre-AdSense. Even if they can comprehend broadcast and print business models, they refuse to participate and then complain about the rising cost of subscription services; services that are now experimenting with reintroducing advertisements.

Journalists are in a boat that Youtube, Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist and Google search plowed into. Until consumer habits change, the sinking continues.

Have they ever considered ... idk, making a compelling product? They sat around watching the whole Metallica vs Napster saga unfold while calling the internet a fad and writing articles about how "blogs aren't trustworthy".

If they spent that time rubbing two brain cells together, they could have come up with something that, for example, resembled OG Hulu or Spotify -- A product that appealed to the new generation of news consumers instead of expecting them to faithfully put in a doorstep newspaper subscription like their parents did.

> Continuously make fun of superficial attributes and mannerisms

> Push said narrative with ad hominem attacks and jokes about someones' appearance

> Look at the episodes he did about Trump in 2016, the host spends half the time making fun of small hands, when you could fill hours with Trump's fascism.

It is foremost a comedy show yes, and they present things in a light hearted way. For an American show that means stuff like that. Mind you the jokes about Trumps' hands are more about something that Trump brings up constantly, a weird public insecurity about the size of them.

> Selectively present a biased narrative without opposition

I mean. I didn't say it doesn't pick a side. But it does go in depth, and it does present opposing arguments reasonably faithfully (even if it immediately rebuts them) (in my opinion!)

Further, they're relying on prior reporting. Like Sagan did for science, Oliver is simply popularizing current events. Oliver's not claiming to be like 60 Minutes or Frontline.

I have found the Gell-Mann amnesia affect to be quite strong with this show. Generally I watch it I feel very convinced of the quality of the arguments and their research. The handful of times the topic has been about something I’ve been fairly knowledgeable on, I’ve been surprised by how poor the episode was.

These days I just assume that’s the quality of the average episode and I don’t know enough to know otherwise.

>> Shows using the format where they do an interview and then selectively air parts of it rather than the whole thing.

Isnt this how newspapers work? Isnt this also how journalism works in general? If that wasnt the case, you wouldnt have two/three completely different takes on stories given which side of the political spectrum you're on.

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