I was kind of surprised when I heard somewhat recently that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were being looked at as legitimate news sources. When I had come back to Seattle after being overseas the better part of the previous four years, one of my friends told me that he watches these shows as his news sources...which I thought was weird.
The last time I’d watched The Daily Show was in college (I don’t think The Colbert Report was on the air yet. In fact, Stephen was still on The Daily Show.) and I’d remembered it being a parody of the news. So when my friend told me he watches it instead of the news, I thought, well maybe they restructured the show. I mean, MTV used to play music videos.
But watching The Daily Show again and being introduced to the Colbert Report, I saw that these were indeed parody shows. So why (or how) was my friend (and many others it seemed) viewing this as credible news?
Then I watched the news. In particular, I watched Fox News and MSNBC News and it started to become clearer.
Now, to back up a few years, I had already stopped watching the news before I’d left for Japan (so before 2003) because it was becoming evident that they were not interested in reporting on things we needed to know, rather, news stations seemed to just be competing against other news stations for ratings by being the first to get something caught on film and report on it before they had any information to report on. So basically, just trying to get the viewers' attention and becoming more for entertainment.
In the years I was overseas, I didn’t watch any news stations on TV. And, apparently in the time I was gone, the news became sillier and sillier, to the point where it became even sillier than the shows that were parodying the news (like The Daily Show and...well really, the current state of the news opened up the opportunity for the Colbert Report to be successful).
It’s amazing, really. It’s like, The Daily Show was inadvertently ahead of the curve. And now, “legitimate” news stations have caught up with The Daily Show, causing Jon Stewart, by default, to become a credible news anchor. And what’s more interesting is that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are aware of this, while journalists from the “legitimate” news stations can’t understand the popularity of The Daily Show or the Colbert Report.
Just, um, yeah. Just really interesting.
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