I rended my garments and beat my chest in embarrassment tonight while listening to Janeane Garofalo rehash tired and unfunny liberal tripe on the Daily Show, while Jon Stewart valiantly tried to point out that liberals are the new conservatives with their hands over their ears.
When did Garofalo quit being a comedian?
Is that how you spell her first name? It’s funny that a comedian who thinks comedian-politicos are serious to voice that seriousness on a show which was supposed to use the idea of a comedian talking about news and politics as a parody. Or maybe Daily Show, which I can only watch every couple of weeks, now takes itself seriously?
Well, there was that one commercial the Daily Show ran when the guest was Richard Clark, and Stewart basically asked the same question. I’d say I get a lot of “news” from the Daily Show that I don’t get from the rest of my “liberal media.”
You don’t get news from it do you? Opinions are not news.
Sure I get news from it. At least the spin is far more obvious (sometimes painfully so). Jon and the audience are clearly anti-Bush, and so for me at least I feel I can filter the “real” news out from the fake or the spin. (For example, when Jon attacks Bush it’s for his actual policies; when he attacks Kerry it’s because Kerry’s letting down the Dem’s). The Daily Show’s also gotten some really amazing guests, and Jon is quite a sharp interviewer, in part because as a comedian he can ask tough questions. The two recent Republican guests (RNC chairman Gillespie and Bush advisor Karen Hughes) were treated with respect, given a serious airing of their viewpoints, and I felt I got to understand to some degree where they were coming from. Hughes, in fact, scared the crap out of me by just how sharp she was and how she very skillfully reparteed Jon’s barbs (agreeing with Jon for making fun of Kerry’s snowboarding was brilliant in that she twisted his words to fit the Bush message about his waffling). No different than most late-night shows, which you shouldn’t see as hard news, except that I happen to think Jon’s a bit smarter and better-prepared than the other hosts.
Sadly, it turns out I’m part of a large demographic that gets their news from talk shows. I try my best to get different spins on the same news (for a while I was reading the NYT, the WSJ, Businessweek, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe) but it gets incredibly overwhelming, especially when I try to keep up with my own “professional” news…
You’re a professional???
Sometimes, when I’m not blogging at the office!