More: The Vanishing of Scale in an Over-the-Top Nation

6 The Tyranny of Talking Points

159 Folks in my line of work have a complex relationship with Jon Stewart, satirist and host of the wildly popular Comedy Central program The Daily Show. For some of us, the finding that young people claim they learn more about politics from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report than from newspapers and the evening news is troubling.1 Not to worry, claim other colleagues: young people who pick up knowledge about the political process from Stewart and Colbert also turn to CNN and Katie Couric to help them make sense of what’s going on.2 And remember “I’m Just a Bill” from the America Rock series on ABC in the 1970s? We’ve long known that entertainment programming lightly tinged with political information can serve as a “gateway” to a deeper interest in world events.3 They get the basics and a laugh from Stewart, and then pick up the Times the following day to flesh out what they’ve learned. And there’s more good news, say scholars Lauren Feldman and Dannagal Goldthwaite Young: Stewart’s viewers remain interested in political campaigns longer than viewers of Jay Leno and David Letterman, whose shows deal only intermittently with politics. While Leno and Letterman fans seek additional information from the mainstream news media during election season, Stewart’s viewers don’t need an election to ramp up their consumption of information from traditional news sources.4 He’s purportedly stoked our year-round interest in news, although that interest is guided to peer through a political prism. The TyraNNy oF TalkiNg poiNTS Six 160 — More — So take heart, mainstream news media (MSM) fans: a recent study by two Ohio State University researchers concluded that those who get their news from traditional sources seek more political news than those who get their news from entertainment programming . Those who tap traditional news sources for political information, particularly information about key issues and political procedure, find their knowledge about politics more accurate than those who rely on entertainment programming.5 And when making a judgment about a candidate or issue, those who watch the CBS Evening News or read the New York Times are more likely to pull information from long-term memory and combine it with what they’ve seen or read. Those who obtain political information from entertainment programming tend to summarize impressions, not reach into long-term memory, before making a judgment about politics or a political figure.6 Still, we worry Stewart has come to epitomize the nearly nonexistent boundary between news and entertainment. We are quick to point out that while what he does is truly funny, even thoughtprovoking , it’s not journalism. We fret that Stewart’s popularity has caused “real” journalists to admit him into their fraternity, further evidence that nobody is interested in protecting the field’s cultural authority. The work of journalists is generally credible and usually timely, these veterans remind us. They still play the “watchdog” role in true Woodward-Bernstein fashion, holding the powerful accountable for their decisions and actions—I prefer the adage “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,” coined by nineteenthcentury author and social critic Finley Peter Dunne. Stories are still built on thorough fact gathering and reliance on competent, informed sources.7 And as skilled and eloquent as Stewart is, he and the Daily Show cast are really purveyors of social commentary in the form of comedy, in the tradition of Mort Sahl, the Smothers Brothers , and, more recently, Bill Maher. They poke fun at the excesses, inequities, contradictions, and flat-out stupidity that characterizes modern politics. Stewart would be the first to tell a gathering of my colleagues that he’s just a comedian. But try telling that to respondents to a 2009 poll conducted by Time magazine who rated Stewart as our most trusted newscaster, well ahead of Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson, and Katie Couric,8 or the young people who report learning more from shows like Stewart’s than from traditional news — The TyraNNy oF TalkiNg poiNTS — 161 sources.9 We lament these same young people are abandoning newspapers for online sources of news. So we hope our students emerge from our classes fully versed in Jürgen Habermas and his concept of the “public sphere,” but at least Stewart causes them to think about the political process and our rather circumscribed role in it. We might wish that they...