Re: Is the Daily Show real journalism?

Towse <self@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Susan wrote:
On Feb 6, 11:34 am, Towse <s...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/05/DDGF7NU0V...>

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

Your first mistake was reading the Chronicle <g>

Hometown paper, you know. Plus we get our Paul Madonna fix on Sundays.

City Lights is publishing a book of his next month. I need to make sure
I gets me one.

<http://www.citylights.com/CLpub4th.html#4561>

the viewers =are= getting news,

Best news on television.

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

A lot of what you read in many newspapers comes directly from the
wire. At least with the Daily Show there's value added to the
aggregation. Insight into the political process, that sort of thing.

The KCBS morning news crew always sounded like it was just sitting
around reading the articles in the morning's Merc and giving a précis
for the morning news.

Day came, when I'd lost my naivety and was writing for print and knew
that the radio show morning team wasn't repurposing bits from the Merc:
they were pulling stories off the wire, as was the Merc. Just happened
to be the same stories, in many cases.

Interesting to see how different editors handle the =exact= same content.

Now, with Google News, you can see 15-20 newspaper articles that all
evolved from the same wire story. Which ones used the wire story as is?
Which ones edited? How much did they edit?

Fun stuff.

For the generation that's graduating college these days, Jon Stewart
=is= their TV news source. They read papers, sometimes. They read online
mostly. Jon Stewart is an easy way to get the top stories in an
entertaining way. But how many of them sit down to the equivalent of
Huntley Brinkley?

"Good night, Chet."
"Good night, David. And good night for NBC News."

... and is there an equivalent of Huntley Brinkley these days?

Is the "Itchy And Scratchy Show" still playing?

--
Subtlety written subtly can be subtly edited away.
.