What would we do without The Daily Show? Seriously.

[DemoTex]

On February 10 & 11 John Oliver did comic reports from the GOP winter meeting in Hawaii. Oliver's reports were funny as shit, scary as hell (the GOPers' unvarnished hypocrisy), and packed with info that all Americans need to know about health care reform (Hawaii's system).

Jon Stewart's coverage (2/11) of Obama's "trap" for the GOP was priceless. Again, the GOP's hypocrisy and the vast right-wing echo machine were lampooned (without mercy).

I salute Jon Stewart and John Oliver for putting the spotlight on these nasty little hypocrites. Thank god for The Daily Show.

Click on "Most Recent Episode" and "More Episodes"

http://www.thedailyshow.com/

[spanone]

1. i know of no other media source that has reported the hypocrisy

[Blue Owl]

2. wouldn't have made it thru the W years w/out TDS

and, to a latter extent, the Colbert Report.

[CurtEastPoint]

3. And yet in spite of the skewering, they (GOP/RW) keep coming on as guests...

Huckabee, Gingrich... my mind's not working now but there are others.

[maxsolomon]

4. i particularly loved oliver's follow up question

oliver asked: "what would you say to a hawaiian who has mandatory govt. health care & likes it?" the GOP lady said "he who pays the piper calls the tune".

oliver followed up with: "what would you say to a hawaiian who says 'what?'". good times...

[rocktivity]

5. When Stewart and Colbert say they fake the news, they're faking

All they're really doing is pointing out how fake the REAL news is--they don't HAVE to make up any of it.

If you missed this '07 DU thread on the subject, it's well worth reading.

...(P)art of what keeps The Daily Show fresh is the fact that it keeps finding new ways to identify, mock, and exploit the absurdities of cable news itself. My current favorite is Stewart's "Meet me at camera three" segments, which exploit a convention that on 'straight' news shows is just a trick to create the illusion of change and development by shooting the same bullshit from a new angle. On The Daily Show, moving to camera three actually takes the show to a new place, where, magically, Stewart can directly address whatever powerful figure he's taking on in an intimate and often surprisingly raw confrontation...

During a recent piece on global warming...one of TDS's "correspondents," John Oliver, proposed that in the name of environmental responsibility, TDS's foreign correspondents could stop actually flying to Paris, London, Baghdad, etc., and instead merely deliver their reports from the studio while standing in front of some kind of computer generated background of the place in question. Jon Stewart then tries to prevent Oliver from revealing to the TV audience that he is in fact standing in the studio right next to Stewart in front of a computer generated image of Paris. The results are hilarious--partly because of the delighted response of the studio audience, who have of course been in on this secret all along, and who love it that Stewart is being forced to come clean for the viewing audience. There's no explicit ideological point to any of that; but it does remind the show's audiences of how closely controlled the medium of broadcast journalism is, how little the viewers really know about what they are consuming, and how pathetic the reality of broadcast news becomes once you look behind the curtain. And that, I would say, is probably what most of the writers, producers, and performers would tell you the show was really about, after you got them past the bullshit about how all they care about is being funny...

link

:headbang:
rocktivity