The Daily Show with Jon Stewart might be a comedy news program but many of the topics discussed on the show are important political issues. The great thing about the show, is that Jon Stewart says basically what we are all thinking. Especially in the episode "CNN Leaves it There". I loved in the intro where he says "As you know yesterday was Football Sunday..." and while he is talking about unimportant issues that happened over the weekend, the audience is watching a video clip from Washington D.C showing thousands of people protesting for gay rights. I noticed that sometimes news stations choose to cover specific stories over bigger and more important stories that will affect our society. CNN did this on Anderson Cooper's show. At first Anderson Cooper is the middle man in a debate versus two men who are discussing health care and unemployment. Right when the audience feels like the debate is going somewhere Anderson Cooper says "We're going to have to leave it there." Will the debate continue after the T.V break? Nope. Anderson Cooper completely switches topics to report on a 5 year-old youtube star. Jon Stewart responses sarcastically "Bravo indeed. To be fair there was probably no other way people could have seen that...youtube video...."
People constantly hear statistics and so-called facts from whatever news network they last watched. We always hear outrageous numbers being thrown around but never question where these so-called experts got their facts. Instead fallacies are used in the news to persuade people to feel a certain way. For instance CNN had Arizona senator Jon Kyl on the network to talk about health care stating "almost everybody agrees that we can save up to 100 billion to 200 billion dollars if we had affective medical mal practice reformed". Who exactly is "almost everybody agrees" and where did he get this 100 billion to 200 billion dollar statistic? Jon Stewart responds with "...that is an impressively high citation free completely made up number! And Kyl had a bunch of them..."
Jon Stewart and The Daily Show writers always use critical thinking when reporting the news. Generally they do not force their opinions on the audience but poke fun at both major political parties so that the audience can come up with their own ideas and opinions. As what a good news network should do.
"I noticed that sometimes news stations choose to cover specific stories over bigger and more important stories that will affect our society."
ReplyDeleteI've also noticed this a lot. Our society is so fast paced that we get bored with issues, whether important or not. If a topic lingers for too long, people lose interest. For instance, the war in Iraq was put on hold when Brittney Spears lost her mind. People jumped all over her and could care less about the war. Funny how people need distractions from distractions, maybe we should stop drinking so much caffeine? Great post!
The media has a certain gift for making the public believe that everything they say is true and accurate. In order to catch the unreasonable arguments one must be informed as well. That way we don't believe or quote the statistics or so called "facts" we hear in the news.
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