Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
There was a great documentary where a lot of the politicians who were satirized on it explained how much they loved and loathed their portrayals which often affected their prospects: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xiafmh
https://firstamendmentmuseum.org/exhibits/virtual-exhibits/a...
This is where preferences meet reality. How do you influence the world to work the way you want it to?
What's the best way to become informed about a topic? Or, is it better to stay ignorant?
There are basically 3 grades of reporting - trashy lies, very biased and informative. Misreporting what people actually said is a strong tell of the first two - which can still be fun to read but ultimately they're trying to sell you on something that is probably against your interests.
For "biased" rather than outright lies, I think the two most common easily observable techniques I see are:
- Quoting known unreliable sources: "Black people eat human babies! (say KKK leadership)"
- Using passive and active voices to shift blame: "Police shoot and kill bystander during drug bust" vs. "Shots fired during drug bust fatally injured potentially uninvolved man"
Read disparate sources knowing they each have their political biases. That is - explicitly read some right (or left) wing news you don't like as a check & balance on the flavor of news you do like to read.
Understand the difference between the news & editorial side of papers.
I would also note that "business news" (WSJ/Bloomberg/etc) tend to be more just-the-facts than your median WaPo/NYT/Fox/MSNBC/NYPost/LAT.
"Between the years 1939 and 1945 more than 6,000,000 Jews died amid a global surge of fatal diseases." is roughly the level of factual accuracy in that specific episode.
In general, I think even without familiarity of the topics discussed it is easy to see how in every episode John Oliver cherry-picks statistics, presents the opinions of individuals as facts or as widely held opinions and slathers the whole show in adjectives so you know exactly what is the correct opinion you are supposed to hold.
I quite enjoy the show as entertainment, but I would not turn to it as a source of truth or to become better informed about a topic.
If that question exist, the answer is: be ignorant. If you are involved into the topic, you will be pretty informed. So the question is: should you be involved into the topic in he first place. If true, you go to the Uni, join NGO, join related job or research program and get informed pretty quickly, otherwise it's not worthy. Besides, with contemporary media all you can hope for is getting misinformed.
I think its success can be attributed to how it presents things that are often inherently worrying, controversial or critical. By partially presenting it in a funny way, it's easier to digest.
The reports typically present verifiable sources and quotes - at least in part. But I don't think he is suggesting that he's the arbiter of unbiased truth. There are clear biases, exaggerations and so on. What they choose to cover is also impacted by these biases.
Given all that, it seems more honest and authentic rather than less.
Compare that to (non-satirical) news media that _does_ act as if it's objectively truthful (except for example if pressed in court). Where claims are made _without_ verifiable sources but via punditry and half-truths.
Cable news is the junk food, and TDS showed it to be so bad that even a parody news show could do a better job of informing people, a point made very often by the host. Using it as an example of junk news is missing the point by a rather wide margin.
> Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
It's all coming from the same six companies, as per the article. It all has a lot of the same messaging - trust the police, the good guys always win, torture is bad but if you have a good reason it's ok, Islam is super scary yo, capitalism is cool actually, being too smart isn't cool, and leave the status quo the fuck alone or get Avengered.
... Turn your brain off at your peril. Junk food can kill. If you really feel the need to watch absolute garbage and ignore the news, you probably need to work less and/or sleep more.
This comment only makes sense if you're trying to imply the Daily Show increases how informed people are.
It seems plausible that causation runs the other way: more informed people are more likely to watch the Daily Show, because then they get all the jokes.
It's the same political culture of preaching to the already converted and mostly shouting about how bad the other side is. No attempts at persuasion.
I sometimes wonder if people who compare things like the daily show or John Oliver to Fox News have watched Fox News at all in the last 15 years or so.
And TDS is not a great example of that, because from the start it was an explicitly self-aware reaction to the awfulness of corporate news.
As a result of this thread I looked into the first US newspaper and discovered it was shut down after one issue because they printed something a governor didn't like, lol. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publick_Occurrences_Both_Forre...