Maybe part of the problem is that news websites are running Internet polls as “news.” But, according to a Time Magazine Internet poll run in the wake of Walter Cronkite’s death, Jon Stewart is the most trusted man in news. To the extent it’s accurate – and I wouldn’t be surprised if a scientific poll came back with similar results – I think it’s because Stewart is the nation’s court jester.
The jester has always been the person in the best position to speak truth to power. On the other hand, it bears mentioning that the traditional news media has done a lousy job. The cheerleading during the run up to the Iraq War was an eye-opening period for me. I’m sure I’m missing some fine reporting, but during that period, from the mainstream media, I remember the reporters from Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) and Chris Matthews doing critical reporting on the administration’s claims. The New York Times was prominently running Judith Miller ra-ra pieces and the rest of the news media was dutifully regurgitating administration claims.
The pretense of objectivity has crippled news reporting in a lot of cases – at least in the way it’s mostly practiced these days. It basically consists of quoting people on opposite sides of some arbitrarily chosen point on an issue. “Moon is made of cheese, some say. Others disagree.” The extra digging necessary to provide readers with something approximating the objective truth is harder work, will piss off those on the wrong side of an issue, and won’t sell any more advertising. So, you get superficial coverage of important issues, more coverage of fluff issues, and, ultimately, teleprompter readers who can’t earn the level of respect given to a basic cable comedy channel host.
I agree with almost all of your assessment, but want to add that we may underestimate the value of “access.”
One of the things that allows Stewart to do what he does is that he doesn’t rely on primary sourcing and access. The bully politics we see today threatens mainstream reporters’ livelihoods by shutting them out.
I would never contend that a reasonable response to such a threat is to capitulate and simply re-type a politician’s press release, but it is what happens.
This idea ties back into the balance argument you make earlier, where balance is not a fair assessment of a contention’s veracity, but merely parroting the contention itself. Even if the press does not see itself as the arbiter of truth, it should at least see itself as the challenger of assertion, which it seems to do on rare occasion only.
He’s smart, he’s funny, and he’s honest. And even though he leans (okay, falls) left, he’s willing to praise the right when it is earned and shread the left when they do something stupid.
Dan Rather on HDNet is the best serious journalist I’ve seen. I don’t know who that other guy was that looked like Dan Rather on one of the big three networks before, but this Dan Rather I feel I can trust, because he researches and lays out all the facts so you can make up your own mind.
It’s not a pretense to objectivity. It’s a pretense of balance, and it was designed to override the ideal of objectivity by bounding of every issue between Republican and Democratic positions, or caricatures of them. This, in turn, was supposed to increase Nixon’s, then Reagan’s, amenability to the relaxation of communications and anti-trust laws, so that Ma Bell, the teevee networks, and large publishing empires could divvy up the Delicious Pie of the coming Cable/Telecommunications revolution (see Beard, Dita; Happy Talk News). Plus reduce the organized right-wing hatemail. Yeah, they missed the whole computer thing, which is why the internets are so much more fun than your cable system.
And the irony is that by the time the specific issues of “biased” reporting (the “bad news” about Vietnam, Civil Rights, and Trickle-Down Voodoo Economics) would come to be seen as having actually been objective, a generation of reporters would have grown up not knowing the difference.
Of course, Doug, if you were an older man you’d just hark back to a time in the mid-70s when ABC–which had tried to dig itself out of a ratings abyss by becoming the Ur-FOX–hired as an anchor a woman with a severe speech impediment and a career as a PR flack. Everything after than has been, pretty much, just further evidence of their utter contempt.
The rarity of the challenges seems proportional to the power of the person making the assertion.
Any really funny political humorist is soon branded ‘liberal’ by those who don’t appreciate the humor.. Why is that?