Recommended viewing: Daily Show 1.30.2008

Jon Stewart takes apart CNN's The Situation Room. Hilarity ensues.

Recommended viewing: Daily Show 10.2.2007

Another grillfest, this time with Hardball's Chris Matthews. Matthews was there to discuss his book, "Life's a Campaign," but Jon's opinion of the book and its philosophy is anything but positive. A transcript can be found here and here are two other takes.

Some thoughts on objectivity and journalism

I skimmed an article describing Bush's recent report of our "progress" in Iraq. The article mentioned casually how this was Bush's 3rd time to Iraq since the war started. Now, I could be interpreting this incorrectly, but I'm pretty sure the journalist included this fact to emphasize the relative smallness of this number.

The reason I mention this is that it made me think about how even the act of including this fact imparts a political bias. Thus, even a seemingly basic task as fact selection is not objective. I'm sure this was obvious to many, but I hadn't thought about it before. I brought this up with my roommate, Allison, and we talked about how given space/time constraints, fact selection must take place. However, as more facts are included, the bias should be reduced. She made the point that 24-hour cable news channels have more time to fully investigate stories and include facts, making it all the much more sad when they don't.

For further information: The Daily Show rails on cable news at least weekly and Fox News has their own documentary, Outfoxed. The latter is interesting in that while it uses many of the techniques designed to influence the viewer (music and graphics to affect viewer's emotional state) and the documentary makers are obviously biased, they make a strong point by simply showing that Fox News is not "Fair and Balanced" as it claims to be.

Recommended viewing: Daily Show 7.25.2007 (belated)

While more than a month old, I still enjoy this clip from the 8.25.2007 episode of the Daily Show. The clip shows Senate judiciary committee's questioning of the unquestionable Alberto Gonzales. The article linked to is essentially a transcript, so just watch the clip.

Update (8.27.2007): Gonzales is resigning, which I did not know at the time of posting. If this isn't positive reinforcement for me starting a blog, I'm not sure what is.

Update 2 (9.1.2007): Oops, the show was 7.25.2007, not 8.25.2007

Recommended viewing: Daily Show 8.15.2007

On 8.15.2007, Jon Stewart was on fire (or perhaps plasma or even the state after that). The episode has two important bits that I've posted in other fashions.

First, meet 1994 Cheney who explains why invading Iraq would be a mistake and predicts with alarming accuracy many of our current problems.

Then see Jon Stewart's grillfest (ranterview?) with Stephen Hayes, Cheney's biographer. For those of you who don't watch the Daily Show, he is clearly much more upset than normal. While he doesn't give Hayes much time to respond to his questions, he doesn't like the answers that he does get. It seems at points as if he sees Hayes as standing in for Cheney/Bush administration:

Stewart: Then stop making the rest of us feel like idiots when we question their strategy in the war on terror, and stop making the rest of us feel like — and I don't mean you, I mean them — [...]

I'm really glad to see interviews like this, despite somewhat misdirected outrage. I hope the segment doesn't prevent him from getting guests like Hayes in the future.