The Daily Show and Institutional Failure

By Fester:

Steve Benen at Political Animal is commenting on the destruction of Cramer on the Daily Show last night and raises an common question:

Watching the evisceration, I couldn't help but wonder why it takes a comedian on Comedy Central to do the kind of interview the non-fake news shows ought to be doing. When the media establishment marvels at Jon Stewart's popularity, they tend to think it's his humor. It's not. It's because he calls "bullsh*t" when most major media players won't. He did so last night, and it made for important viewing.

Both the Daily Show and Colbert Report have a bull-shit calling functioning that only exists because the other institutional players that normatively should be calling bullshit have either been co-opted, run out of business or forgot that was there function. This institutional failure is widespread and it is why there is such a large market for someone to call bullshit. It is not being done elsewhere. And this institutional failure is widespread across America.

Nate Silver a few days ago highlighted the 2008 General Social Survey. One of the question groups that they ask is how much do people trust major institutions and groups in American life. And over the past thirty years, institutional trust and therefore institutional legitimacy has taken a beaten. This is the greater context in which the Daily Show thrives, it has expanded into this gap of trust as there is a massive divergence between what people are seeing with their own eyes, and what people are hearing from the elite perspective.

Glenn Greenwald pulls this lack of institutional trust and massive institutional failure into a sharp piece this morning:

That's the heart of the (completely justifiable) attack on Cramer and CNBC by Stewart. They would continuously put scheming CEOs on their shows, conduct completely uncritical "interviews" and allow them to spout wholesale falsehoods. And now that they're being called upon to explain why they did this, their excuse is: Well, we were lied to. What could we have done? And the obvious answer, which Stewart repeatedly expressed, is that people who claim to be "reporters" are obligated not only to provide a forum for powerful people to make claims, but also to then investigate those claims to inform the public if the claims are true. That's about as basic as it gets....

The only other occasion when media stars were forced to address these criticisms was when Bush's own Press Secretary, Scott McClellan, wrote a book accusing the American media of being "too deferential" to the administration. In response, Russert's replacement, David Gregory, twice insisted that the criticisms directed at the press for the role they played in the run-up to the war are baseless and misguided -- most recently in an interview with Stephen Colbert (after defending the media's pre-war behavior, Gregory was promoted by NBC to his Meet the Press position). When defending the media's behavior, Gregory echoed exactly the definining mentality of Jim Cramer: pointing out when officials are lying is "not our role."...

But just as was true for Judy Miller (and her still-celebrated cohort, Michael Gordon), Jim Cramer isn't an aberration. What he did and the excuses he offered are ones that are embraced as gospel to this day by most of our establishment press corps, and to know that this is true, just look at what they do and say about their roles....

The Daily Show will prosper as a skewering of the news industry as long as the news industry does not deliver news. And right now there are very few competitors that want to go into that gap and deliver some closure on the divergence of observed and reported realities.

Comments

[rusted]

talk about hitting the nail on the head!

[the spelling guy]

or forgot that was there function

their

not there

[Tex Long]

"...the kind of interview the non-fake news shows ought to be doing."

Duhhh? Because the "shows" to which he refers are NOT "non-fake". They ARE fake news, they are not "news" at all. See "McDonald, Ronald: Is he a real Clown?"

[cp]

I get all the news that I need from the Daily Show without any of the bullsh*t in other channels.

The only thing that puzzles me in this Cramer vs. Stewart is that why we didn't get Hannity vs. Stewart or O'Reilly vs. Stewart ? I feel fox news deserved the needed to be called out long ago than NBC, for all those years of propaganda.