More on Jon Stewart
My recent post comparing Jon Stewart to Shakespeare’s “Bottom” provoked some passionate responses which served to illustrate my point. For readers who are interested in these things, I will now share some recently-released data to illustrate the situation.
The reactions to me initial post can be lumped into three general categories, all of which I will address here.
1. “I love Jon Stewart! Jon Stewart is really smart; why are you picking on him?!?”
This was the most common response by far, but also the most perplexing. I never argued that Stewart is stupid or unethical, nor that he never makes good points. In fact, quite the opposite.
What I claimed is that YOU are not made any smarter about the issues that matter by watching Stewart.
2. “Well, he is a better journalist than ‘Oprah’, and he never claimed to be a news guy anyway!”
This was nearly as common as the first, and only slightly less bewildering. You’ll notice that there are two mutually contradictory claims here: A) Jon Stewart does a better job of journalism than <insert_name>, and B) Jon Stewart is not a journalist. Strangely, these two mutually contradictory claims are almost always made in tandem.
Perhaps this is a way of saying, “Professional journalists suck so badly that we might as well get our news from a guy who makes fart noises for a living”, and some of my correspondents would no doubt agree with that sentiment. But this is setting a very low bar, and is not exactly a rebuttal of my claim that Jon Stewart doesn’t make you smarter about the issues that matter. Saying, “everyone else makes me stupider” is not equivalent to proving that “Stewart makes me smarter”.
Another way that this argument was used was to argue, essentially, “nobody trusts what Stewart says, anyway, so you are just tilting at windmills.” One correspondent, overcome by a paroxysm of sophomoric literary allusion, even used the phrase “Quixotic”.
Luckily, Rasmussen rode to my defense by publishing this survey the very next day. Some choice tidbits:
Nearly one-third of Americans under the age of 40 say satirical news-oriented television programs like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart are taking the place of traditional news outlets.
Thirty-nine percent (39%) of adults say programs of this nature are making Americans more informed about news events, while 21% believe they make people less informed. Twelve percent (12%) say they have no impact.
So, given that a growing number of people consider Jon Stewart to be a superior substitute for “real” journalism, we should be interested in data that can test this hypothesis. Luckily, the Pew Research Center has just what we need.
The survey asked a random sampling of people to answer 23 questions about current events, and then rated the people “high”, “medium”, or “low” depending on how many questions they answered correctly.
Impressively, viewers of Colbert and Stewart are far less likely to score “low” knowledge than viewers of network news. Only viewers of Bill O’Reilly have higher knowledge of current events than people who watch Colbert and Stewart. Since I lumped Colbert and Stewart with O’Reilly in my initial post, I can consider them as a group here – and as a group, they outperform all of the other news outlets tested by the Pew Center.
Before I completely concede this point, though, it is important to note that the Pew Center test appears to show a significant decline in overall knowledge since 1989, and the decline is summarily explained away with some rather specious rhetoric. And more importantly, the survey simply tested for knowledge of what is essentially trivia. That is, viewers of Stewart, Colbert, and O’Reilly are more likely than average to be able to correctly say that the economy DID collapse. But none of the three programs covered any of the voices who warned about it before the fact.
However, if we allow ourselves to indulge in the psychological bias known as “anchoring effect”, I’m perfectly comfortable saying that viewers of John Stewart are more informed than viewers of Oprah. I simply dispute how relevant that fact is.
3. Nothing is knowable
This all-too-common argument was the most annoying to me. Several correspondents maintained, in paraphrase, “The only liar is someone who claims to be helping you to understand the truth. Nothing is knowable, so the only guy who I trust is the guy who says that all ‘truth’ is a lie.”
This seems reasonable, and even vaguely moral, until you think about it for two seconds. For example, all of these people previously believed that “housing prices will continue to go up indefinitely”. They all believed that “money invested in an index fund will double every 18 years or sooner”. Not only did they all have very concrete beliefs about reality; they backed those beliefs up with action – by investing in certain ways. And many of them took a bath based on their beliefs.
Claiming to believe (or not believe) a thing, and behaving in a different manner, is the definition of hypocrisy. And claiming to believe nothing at all is just moronic sophistry.
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As always, South Park has the best commentary on the current economic mess. “And …. it’s gone!” Not only is it spot-on; it has the added benefit of not being considered “journalism” by 30% of the population.