Now I'm Confused
11/27/06 09:09
A few nights ago I was listening to my local NPR
station and I caught part of a series of interviews
with various celebrities commemorating the 80th (I
think) anniversary of The New Yorker
magazine. One of the interviews I heard was with John
Stewart of The Daily Show on Comedy Central.
Stewart is a very perceptive critic of our mainstream
media and he said a couple of things that really gave
me pause. I've been searching the intertoobz this
morning for a transcript, but I haven't had any luck,
so I'll just paraphrase.
The first thing that got my attention was Stewart's statement that in our media, there exists clarity and noise. When asked where CNN and Fox News belonged in those categories, he said they were both noise, the difference between them being that the noise generated by Fox is purposeful. They have intentionally set out to correct what they perceive to be a left-leaning bias in our nation's news coverage. This struck me as a very simple truth. Fox News exists for the sole purpose of muddying the waters of our national discourse and they've been so successful at it that CNN has sacrificed clarity and journalistic integrity in order to compete for viewers who prefer titillation and scandal over intelligence and truth.
The other thing Stewart said (and this just blew me away) was that dubya is actually a very smart man who just pretends to be a backward rube from Texas. To back up this claim, Stewart noted that dubya has degrees from both Yale and Harvard, and he pointed out how the preznit, when speaking to the American people, always speaks in very simple terms, as if he's talking to a child. Now I admit I'm a little biased when it comes to this president. I don't like him or his policies, but having said that, I sure thought I had a handle on him as far as his overall intelligence. I've listened to a lot of dubya's speechifying over the last 5 plus years, and it's always been a train wreck. More than once I've yelled at my television, "It's nuclear, not nucular, you fucking moron!" I've always been a poor public speaker myself, so I could understand his inability to string three sentences together without a lot of stumbling and bumbling and re-starting, but I always assumed the complete lack of depth in the content of his speeches was a reflection of his own shallowness. It never once occurred to me that he might be talking down to his audience because he thinks they are stupid. Wow. Just, wow.
The first thing that got my attention was Stewart's statement that in our media, there exists clarity and noise. When asked where CNN and Fox News belonged in those categories, he said they were both noise, the difference between them being that the noise generated by Fox is purposeful. They have intentionally set out to correct what they perceive to be a left-leaning bias in our nation's news coverage. This struck me as a very simple truth. Fox News exists for the sole purpose of muddying the waters of our national discourse and they've been so successful at it that CNN has sacrificed clarity and journalistic integrity in order to compete for viewers who prefer titillation and scandal over intelligence and truth.
The other thing Stewart said (and this just blew me away) was that dubya is actually a very smart man who just pretends to be a backward rube from Texas. To back up this claim, Stewart noted that dubya has degrees from both Yale and Harvard, and he pointed out how the preznit, when speaking to the American people, always speaks in very simple terms, as if he's talking to a child. Now I admit I'm a little biased when it comes to this president. I don't like him or his policies, but having said that, I sure thought I had a handle on him as far as his overall intelligence. I've listened to a lot of dubya's speechifying over the last 5 plus years, and it's always been a train wreck. More than once I've yelled at my television, "It's nuclear, not nucular, you fucking moron!" I've always been a poor public speaker myself, so I could understand his inability to string three sentences together without a lot of stumbling and bumbling and re-starting, but I always assumed the complete lack of depth in the content of his speeches was a reflection of his own shallowness. It never once occurred to me that he might be talking down to his audience because he thinks they are stupid. Wow. Just, wow.
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