2008 Woodie Awards
CNN's got nothin' on Stewart, Colbert
Kelly Truong
Issue date: 5/27/08 Section: Opinion
Jon Stewart has got competition. As popular as "The Daily Show" is, it needs to work on its tagline if it's to have any hope of competing with such bastions of journalistic integrity that are the current popular choices for political coverage. Just click through the channels: you'll see MSNBC has "the best political team on cable"; CNN, "the best political team on television"; Fox News is the winner, however, with "the best political team ever."
How can you top that? "Bestest ever," maybe? With hyperbole like this, it must be hard to choose the best source of TV news. But the very existence of news channels' advertising slogans - setting aside their hilariously over-the-top nature, and the fact that they all appear to have been coined by the same high school yearbook staffer - clearly demonstrates the very first rule of cable news: it's not really news.
But it's pretending to be, and that's what saves Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert from falling into the trap of sloppy sensationalism that defines practically every other television news programs; these two have absolutely no allusions about what it is they're offering. Colbert asks his interview subjects questions like, "George Bush: great president, or greatest president?" Because after all, he's appearing on a channel called Comedy Central. It's comedy, folks.
While CNN, on the other hand, runs exit polls questioning whether acidic comments by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright were a deciding factor in voters' choosing their candidate - essentially making it an issue whether voters considered it one or not. Though it may seem comedic, it wasn't meant to be funny. It's mostly just depressing.
There's a reason behind the theatrical nature of cable news coverage. It's green and it folds neatly into a wallet. In 2006, The New York Times published an article titled "With Brash Hosts, Headline News Finds More Viewers in Prime Time," discussing CNN's recent hiring of conservative talk show host Glenn Beck. In the article, former CNN employee Mark Feinstein lays out the reason behind CNN's solicitation of Beck: "They had these [ratings] charts, it was like a EKG of a heart attack - I remember an executive who said, in essence, we need to find a way to have heart attacks all the time."
How can you top that? "Bestest ever," maybe? With hyperbole like this, it must be hard to choose the best source of TV news. But the very existence of news channels' advertising slogans - setting aside their hilariously over-the-top nature, and the fact that they all appear to have been coined by the same high school yearbook staffer - clearly demonstrates the very first rule of cable news: it's not really news.
But it's pretending to be, and that's what saves Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert from falling into the trap of sloppy sensationalism that defines practically every other television news programs; these two have absolutely no allusions about what it is they're offering. Colbert asks his interview subjects questions like, "George Bush: great president, or greatest president?" Because after all, he's appearing on a channel called Comedy Central. It's comedy, folks.
While CNN, on the other hand, runs exit polls questioning whether acidic comments by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright were a deciding factor in voters' choosing their candidate - essentially making it an issue whether voters considered it one or not. Though it may seem comedic, it wasn't meant to be funny. It's mostly just depressing.
There's a reason behind the theatrical nature of cable news coverage. It's green and it folds neatly into a wallet. In 2006, The New York Times published an article titled "With Brash Hosts, Headline News Finds More Viewers in Prime Time," discussing CNN's recent hiring of conservative talk show host Glenn Beck. In the article, former CNN employee Mark Feinstein lays out the reason behind CNN's solicitation of Beck: "They had these [ratings] charts, it was like a EKG of a heart attack - I remember an executive who said, in essence, we need to find a way to have heart attacks all the time."
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