Newspapers are hanging on for dear life. Comedians, meanwhile, are cleaning up.
In fact, one is a now the junior senator from Minnesota.
For many Americans, “The Daily Show,” hosted by satirist Jon Stewart, has supplanted the evening news. And this year The Onion, a site that is 100 percent parody, won a Peabody Award for its online send-up of cable-TV news. One-time sportscaster Keith Olbermann brings attitude aplenty to his MSNBC show, “Countdown.”
They say things. They’re not afraid. You might call them modern-day court jesters. Jesters could . . . give bad news to the King that no-one else would dare deliver. The best example of this is in 1340, when the French fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Sluys by the English. Phillippe VI’s jester told him the English sailors ‘don’t even have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French.’”
With a few adjustments, that quote could have been lifted from the script of “The Daily Show.”
Jesters delivered bad news, and we’ve had an awful lot of bad news this decade, starting with 9/11. And a few months ago, Vanguard founder John Bogle said this was the worst bear market he’d ever seen.
Bogle is 80 years old. Yikes.
Gallows humor has always gone hand-in-hand with hard times, but now we’re witnessing something new.
Fans of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh believe them to be honest, “fair and balanced,” whereas “liberal media,” aka CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and . . . well, virtually all remaining news outlets, just regurgitate left-wing talking points.
Some think Fox News is just a joke. They would do well to take note of Fox’s 7-percent increase in prime-time ratings this year. And that’s despite the fact that Fox is seen as the most ideological network in America, according to results of a Pew Research poll released a few months ago. Jon Stewart certainly has a few things to say about Beck and Fox News, as this recent performance shows.
How did we get here? Why do we trust comedians and demagogues more than established news sources?
Come back with me to 1996. The Internet was just a wailing infant, but cable TV had begun to mature. One night I heard my husband laughing his head off at some HBO show. Neither of us are fans of stand-up comedy, so I finally went in the living room and asked him what was so funny.
On TV was Chris Rock in his breakthrough show, “Bring the Pain.” I listened for a while, and thought: How can he say things that would get most of us fired or shunned? But he did.
The truth, Chris Rock understood, is funny. Three years prior, comedian Rick Reynolds argued much the same in his Showtime special, “Only the Truth Is Funny.” These comedians, and others like the late George Carlin and Lenny Bruce, presaged the raw commentary we find all over the Internet.
For decades newspapers enjoyed monopolies, and newsrooms became Soviet-style bureaucracies that could not nimbly respond to changes in technology or the communities they covered.
Back in the day, people picked up the paper whether or not they liked it because 1) movies and TV schedules, and 2) comics, and 3) classifieds.
Today those are online, online and online (and free to boot on Craigslist).
OK, but what about the quality of what’s online?
Let’s just take a look at a recent essay, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” on the Web site of the esteemed Columbia Journalism Review to see what the best minds in the country have to say on this topic.
Be forewarned: It’s long. It’s 17 Web pages, to be exact. Here’s an excerpt:
Newspapers and television news are not going to vanish in the foreseeable future, despite frequent predictions of their imminent extinction. But they will play diminished roles in an emerging and still rapidly changing world of digital journalism, in which the means of news reporting are being re-invented, the character of news is being reconstructed, and reporting is being distributed across a greater number and variety of news organizations, new and old.
Wow. That was just the second paragraph. Can’t wait to read the rest, can ya?
Compare that to any random paragraph on any random date on the blogs Reflections of a Newsosaur, Newspaper Death Watch, Recovering Journalist and Buzz Machine, and you will see a marked difference. As in: You just might feel engaged enough to keep reading.
One comment on the Columbia Journalism Review post caught my eye: “We’ve all been to a hundred earnest conferences these last few years. Has there ever been a panel that asked: What did we do to disengage our audience, to inspire this lack of trust in our publications and suspicion about our role in society?”
What, indeed. The unspoken implication is: If you have to ask, then you don’t want to know, since the evidence is all around you.
The kingmakers are dead. Long live the kingmakers!
[originally published by Politics Daily in 2009]
