Is the Daily Show real journalism?

<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/05/DDGF7NU0V81.DTL>

Today the Chronicle profiles Venise Wagner, an assistant professor and associate chair of the journalism department at SFSU, who teaches a demanding public journalism class. She teaches other classes as well, but the focus of the article is on the public journalism/community reporting class.

End of the article, this:

"Every semester, in my Mass Media class, we get into an argument about whether 'The Daily Show' is real journalism. The students insist that it's journalism. I argue that it's satire. They don't do their own reporting -- it's entertainment wrapped around news.

"I tell my students, "You may be learning something and you may be having fun while you're learning it, but you're not getting news.'"

And there she lost me. The Daily Show may not be real journalism, but the viewers =are= getting news, just not news that the Daily Show staff tracked down and dragged back to the studio to report on their own.

What is journalism? What is news?

If your news source aggregates the news it presents from other sources, does that make it any less a source of news?

Jon Stewart for President?!*?%

--
Sal

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