
Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News - jonmc12
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122375199&sc=fb&cc=fp
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biotech
In TFA, Brian Williams mentions Stewart's takedown of Cramer in an interview
in which 'the odds were stacked against Jim Cramer'.

This brought to mind a brilliant attack on the now defunct political show
"Crossfire", in which Liberals battled Conservatives. In a nutshell, Stewart
was brought on as a guest after attacking Crossfire on The Daily Show.
Although Stewart is the guest on the show, he takes the offensive and puts the
Crossfire hosts at an instant disadvantage. Here's the link:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE>

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pavs
The odds were stacked against the hosts. Cause you know, they are dumb and
partisan hacks pretending to be fair under the disguise of a talk show. One of
those idiots, Tucker Carlson, never bounced back and lost his job.

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cookiecaper
I guess I don't know what you mean by "never bounced back". Tucker Carlson
hosted a show on MSNBC called "Tucker" for multiple years after Crossfire's
cancellation, until around the end of 2008 iirc. I think if you get your _own_
TV show, and it runs for a few years, that's "bouncing back".

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pavs
Both of his shows got cancelled. Hence, never bounced back. When you get
demoted from a show host to a "panelist", that's not bouncing back. Its like
Conan O' Brian doing stand-up gigs after leaving The Tonight Show.

~~~
cookiecaper
Well, at some point that happens to everyone. I think he bounced back, but was
dropped again. "bounce back" doesn't have to be permanent; it's not like
Tucker never received momentum, it ran for almost three years, which is longer
than a lot of shows on cable news.

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InclinedPlane
What more and more people have been discovering in the modern age of openness
and availability is that much of what we once thought of as serious
institutions (televised and written news, for example) are far more style than
substance.

The Daily Show's critiques of modern journalism are so devastating because,
despite being a fly by night fake news organization with comedy as their main
goal, somehow they manage to put on a news show that is nearly as substantive
as the competition, merely by accident. And that's due to the fact that in
news these days there really isn't much _there_ there. Once you boil away all
the high-gloss production values and the special access and the fame and the
reputation you find out that at its core there is very little legitimate,
original reporting work being done in the mainstream media. Which is
understandable, because the big media companies learned long ago that hard
journalism is difficult business, costly, and sometimes hard to sell to the
viewing public. But the rate of return on glossy production values,
infotainment, and pseudogravitas is through the roof.

But these tricks are approaching the limit of their shelf life. The big TV and
print news organizations aren't attracting new, young viewers, their
viewership has been getting old, and dwindling. They are rapidly approaching
becoming inconsequential and that has as much to do with folks like Jon
Stewart pulling up the stakes of their circus tent as it does with technology
passing them by.

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novum
One of the commenters makes an interesting point: is Jon Stewart doing what he
does because he believes in journalistic integrity, or because he's an
entertainer and this is just an act?

I hope for the former, I really do. Maybe I'm not cynical enough.

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shib71
I suspect it began as the later, and the former crept in while they weren't
paying attention. If you look at the early shows they didn't give anywhere
near the time to current events and politics as recent ones do.

~~~
pavs
Whats the point of writing jokes when news organizations and politicians does
it for?

I suspect the editors of the Daily Show has a pretty easy job. It shouldn't be
that hard to find materials with the amount of farce available from news
organizations and so called journalists.

TV news is a joke with partisan hacks caring more about supporting their team
(left or right) as opposed to reporting the news.

Thankfully, I disconnected my cable about 1 year ago (right after the
election).

Times are better spent reading books, if I care about any interesting TV shows
I can watch it on hulu. Its amazing how muh free time you have when you don't
have cable anymore.

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euroclydon
Brian Williams is bad for news.

Remember his coming out party? Hurricane Kartina? Remember when he said he
didn't know how he would answer his daughters questions about why the
government was so racist? I wonder what he ever figured out...

