Jon Stewart, Public Enemy #1
Researchers have found that, after an intermediate-level class in literature, students were more likely to be skeptical of one-sided textual interpretations!
No, sorry, sorry. Researchers have found that an adequate grounding in nutrition makes people more likely to read food labels thoroughly before purchasing!
Sorry, sorry again. No, what they found is that watching "The Daily Show" made people more cynical about politics. You can see why I got confused. After all, the basic principles are the same: making people aware of the various facets of a complex topic will usually cause them to be more discerning. That's why people with something to hide tend to simplify.
This is only a problem when people parlay such results into headlines like "Jon Stewart: Enemy of Democracy?" The implication is that, by making people aware of the complexity -- and often the ugliness -- of politics, Stewart will induce a sense of apathy among the youth, and prevent them from voting. There are a few mistakes here. First, there's an unstated assumption that "The Daily Show" presents an inaccurate view of political events. Since this isn't so, despite TDS's status as a humor program, we must entertain the possibility that it's the events themselves -- not Stewart's reports -- that are causing cynicism. As Nick argues, it's democracy, not reporting on democracy, that's harming democracy. There is also, to my mind, a serious misunderstanding of the significance of cynicism. The unstated assumption is that cynicism leads to apathy, but I find that a slightly jaundiced view of politics is necessary to avoid hopeless idealism and promote a down-to-brass-tacks sort of activism. Plus, if Stewart makes people cynical, he makes them even more righteously angry. I don't have study data on that, of course, but I'd like to see it done.
It's obvious at this point that we here at Truth Tables like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. We consider them to be ambassadors of logic and reason. And this sort of overblown well-poisoning is really unnecessary. Must we really leap from "people express more political cynicism after watching 'The Daily Show'" to "'The Daily Show' will keep people from voting"? The argument, besides being oversimplified, relies on covert premises and disingenuous assumptions about causation. If you were actually watching Jon Stewart, Richard Morin, you'd have better reasoning than that.
No, sorry, sorry. Researchers have found that an adequate grounding in nutrition makes people more likely to read food labels thoroughly before purchasing!
Sorry, sorry again. No, what they found is that watching "The Daily Show" made people more cynical about politics. You can see why I got confused. After all, the basic principles are the same: making people aware of the various facets of a complex topic will usually cause them to be more discerning. That's why people with something to hide tend to simplify.
This is only a problem when people parlay such results into headlines like "Jon Stewart: Enemy of Democracy?" The implication is that, by making people aware of the complexity -- and often the ugliness -- of politics, Stewart will induce a sense of apathy among the youth, and prevent them from voting. There are a few mistakes here. First, there's an unstated assumption that "The Daily Show" presents an inaccurate view of political events. Since this isn't so, despite TDS's status as a humor program, we must entertain the possibility that it's the events themselves -- not Stewart's reports -- that are causing cynicism. As Nick argues, it's democracy, not reporting on democracy, that's harming democracy. There is also, to my mind, a serious misunderstanding of the significance of cynicism. The unstated assumption is that cynicism leads to apathy, but I find that a slightly jaundiced view of politics is necessary to avoid hopeless idealism and promote a down-to-brass-tacks sort of activism. Plus, if Stewart makes people cynical, he makes them even more righteously angry. I don't have study data on that, of course, but I'd like to see it done.
It's obvious at this point that we here at Truth Tables like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. We consider them to be ambassadors of logic and reason. And this sort of overblown well-poisoning is really unnecessary. Must we really leap from "people express more political cynicism after watching 'The Daily Show'" to "'The Daily Show' will keep people from voting"? The argument, besides being oversimplified, relies on covert premises and disingenuous assumptions about causation. If you were actually watching Jon Stewart, Richard Morin, you'd have better reasoning than that.
posted by jess at 1:59 PM
1 Comments:
From the article:
Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris of East Carolina University said previous research found that nearly half -- 48 percent -- of this age group watched "The Daily Show" and only 23 percent of show viewers followed "hard news" programs closely.
Every time I see this kind of alarmist study, the pundits pull out this kind of false dichotomy: you watch Jon Stewart or you watch "hard news." Never mind for the moment that the Post article does not tell us what the researchers define as "hard news"--that's another issue altogether. But to assume that people get their new from TV at all is so, well, 1990s. Of course young people don't watch network news; in an age when all of the NY Times is accessible online (with a little help from bugmenot), who's going to sit down at 6:30 to watch what Brian Williams says happened in the world today? We can see what CNN or BBC says minute by minute. We can read the newspaper to see what lasts more than 5 minutes in the news cycle--and we can get more than a 30-second sound byte to understand what it is. You're completely right, Jess--there are myriad unstated assumptions here, few of which seem supportable to anyone under, say, 35.
What this article also fails to acknowledge is that The Daily Show is not funny if you don't follow the news. Period. They don't do segments on pet psychics like in the Craig Kilborn age. The show is a fake news show about real news. If its audience can discern irony, and therefore express cynicism, more readily than those who just watch the talking heads, then democracy is better for it.
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