The Daily Show has been on a roll lately, with some brutal indictments of the petty horse-race journalism perpetuated by the major news networks, especially FOX. My personal favorite was Jon Stewart's surprisingly civil conversation with Mark Thiessen which, while not as vicious as Stewart's assault on Jim Cramer, certainly put Thiessen's reluctance to interact with reality on full display.
These clipse deserve to be watched again and again and again.
First on the chopping block is FOX's coverage of the recent nuclear security summit. Even if you believe FOX is being sincere when it does things like this, the outright rejection of traditional journalism tools like basic fact-checking belies the network's emphasis on sensationalism and not reporting.
Next, the Daily Show shines its spotlight on the media's refusal to search for reasonable (and admittedly rare) dissenters among conservatives and Tea Party activists.
Last but not least, here's part one of the full interview with Marc Thiessen. If you watch this, make sure to watch the other two. Thiessen may be well-spoken, but his cowardly position on state-sanctioned torture is indefensible and, as in so many other interviews, Thiessen ends up fighting over the parts of the discusison that don't matter. In this case, he ends up dragging the interview into a tedious debate about the definition of the word hypothetical.
No comments:
Post a Comment