Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic discusses Why Broadcast Journalism Is Flirting With Jon Stewart:
Would network news be better if politicians were interviewed by comedians rather than broadcast journalists? That’s one question raised by Gabriel Sherman’s report that NBC executives wanted Jon Stewart to host Meet the Press, the prestigious Sunday-morning interview program. Had higher-ups at NBC pursued Jimmy Kimmel or Sacha Baron Cohen for the gig, they’d stand accused of undermining the quality of their news programming to chase ratings. But few doubt that The Daily Show grapples with politics and policy, often with more sophistication than the broadcast journalists it incisively mocks. For that reason, news that Stewart was considered for the gig has prompted earnest debate about the merits of the idea. Some say he’s “a devastatingly effective interrogator,” others that he’s “congenitally unprepared for any serious policy discussion.”
That fight is beside the point. Interviews on The Daily Show are uneven, but they’re also a rushed afterthought on a daily program whose purpose is to get laughs. How would Stewart perform given a week for interview prep and a charge to inform? I’d wager he’d do better than any Meet the Press host. But that is a low bar.
E.J. Dionne Jr at The Washington Post writes ‘Citizens United’ is turning more Americans into bystanders:
Defenders of massive spending on advertising, positive or negative, will make the case that at least the ads engage voters. Not necessarily, and certainly not this year. Indeed, the Pew Research Center found in early October that only 15 percent of Americans are following the elections “very closely.” Interest in the campaign, says Scott Keeter, director of survey research at Pew, “is the lowest it has been at this point in an off-year election in at least two decades.”
Robert Fisk at The Independent Beware of the role of the laptop in our addiction to politics and war:
Ever since the Pentagon started talking about Isis as apocalyptic, I’ve suspected that websites and blogs and YouTube are taking over from reality. I’m even wondering whether “Isis”—or Islamic State or Isil, here we go again—isn’t more real on the internet than it is on the ground. Not, of course, for the Kurds of Kobani or the Yazidis or the beheaded victims of this weird caliphate. But isn’t it time we woke up to the fact that internet addiction in politics and war is even more dangerous than hard drugs?
Over and over, we have the evidence that it is not Isis that “radicalises” Muslims before they head off to Syria—and how I wish David Cameron would stop using that word—but the internet. The belief, the absolute conviction that the screen contains truth—that the “message” really is the ultimate verity—has still not been fully recognised for what it is; an extraordinary lapse in our critical consciousness that exposes us to the rawest of emotions—both total love and total hatred—without the means to correct this imbalance. The “virtual” has dropped out of “virtual reality.”
At its most basic, you have only to read the viciousness of internet chatrooms. Major newspapers – hopelessly late – have only now started to realise that chatrooms are not a new technical version of “Letters to the Editor” but a dangerous forum for people to let loose their most-disturbing characteristics. Thus a major political shift in the Middle East, transferred to the internet, takes on cataclysmic proportions
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