Gotta Know What’s Goin’ On
I forgot to mention an article I saw in The New York Times a few weeks ago in the Sunday edition. It seems book publishers consider The Daily Show with Jon Stewart an A-list publicity stop. Reason: Viewers of the show are book readers. Evidence: Among other things, Amazon sales spike after an author's appearance (to a greater extent than other shows).
This surprises me not at all. I don't think you can find The Daily Show very funny if you don't know what's going on in the world and if you aren't "news media literate" to a fairly high degree.
In my media ethics class recently, a bit of anecdotal evidence emerged regarding the intellectual chops it takes to enjoy Stewart (and Colbert). One of my students works as a news photographer for a local television station. He tells this story:
Typical of television news operations, the newsroom has several televisions tuned into various news programs throughout the day. And one of them is tuned to The Daily Show at 10:30 p.m. central time Monday through Thursday. (Which I find rather hilarious considering how hard Stewart is on television news.) Quite often, younger technical employees--fresh out of school and new to their jobs--don't find the show all that funny. But after a few weeks of working in a news organization, they begin "laughing just like the rest of us."
Getting smarter being around journalism? Getting it because they see first-hand what Stewart is satirizing? I don't know. But I find this anecdote interesting.
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Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 3:55 pm under
