Why my fantasy novel is entitled: How The Daily Show is Killing America So you wanna make it as a writer in this world? Well, the first thing you have to learn is that image is everything. Nothing will ever matter as much as your title, and no book will have as big of an impact as it's reviews do. Case in point: The Bell Curve. This book itself doesn't matter nearly as much as the fact that it was the first book to be widely acknowledge as being more important as a book to be reviewed, a touchstone for conversation, than as an actual text. Others might quote you Stephan Hawking's A Brief History of Time. The point remains the same. Those people who do this are probably well intentioned, but unfortunately they are misguided. We can only hope not perhaps fatality. Hawkings book probably produced more unread copies than the Bell Curve, but it didn't matter nearly as much. Which brings me to the book you hold in your hands: How the Daily Show is Dumbing Down America. Image is everything, content is incidental. I don't support this, but it is a truth that can no longer be ignored in America. Perhaps in Canada as well, but I don't know. I live in America, I ignore Canada. And Europe too. Afra what? See- There I went off topic again, don’t worry, I’ll be doing that a lot. It’s a technique I’ve developed, slowly, carefully, methodically. It’s like a nervous tick.. Why you may ask? I will answer: Because it takes up space. You see, in our current “world-system” (as fantasy authors like to refer to such things) the content of an item doesn’t matter nearly as much as its marketability. Or, as a great man once said: “Image is everything, content is incidental.” As with every great theory, there are exceptions to this rule, mostly due to advertising. We need products with enough quality that people keep coming back to gape at them- otherwise what would we plaster our ads for other products on? Thus the TV show: Friends was born. The part of this theory that applies to books forces us to revisit the distant past, in the form of a book entitled: The Bell Curve. Symbolically speaking (that’s scholar talk for image-wise, the most important wise you can have) the Bell Curve signifies the breaking point for book reviews, just as Frampton Comes Alive was the breaking point for scruples in the music industry. The Bell Curves author was an instant expert on a topic he had done virtually no research on. He made speaking tours, and the reviews of his book sparked a very serious national debate. Despite the fact that his research was made up on the spot and his orginal ideas couldn’t have filled a newspaper column. The book was ideally placed because the reviews of the book could to sum up pretty much everything he had to say. Everything else could be found on the back blurb. Because as I noted (and I hate to belabor the point) the book was by and large poorly researched and contained a lot of nonsense. That is Coincidental however, and the book could have just as easily been written by a true expert in the field (ala Brief history of time). The point is, I’m no expert on the Daily Show. But it’s a hot topic nowadays, and one that deserves a book. I’m just the one to deliverer it. Why? Because I’ve got a couple of ideas on the topic that fit will fill out a book review quite nicely. “But wait!” you might say! “This book I hold in my hands is pretty thick”. There is no need for you to stop reading and skim through the book, it’s full of words the whole way through. Trust me. I’ve only got two or three ideas about the Daily Show, a topic ripe for popular appeal, but I’ve also got a 300-page fantasy novel that. Don’t worry, I won’t insist you read it. It’s mostly filler. In the olden days people with a couple of poignant ideas and no inclination to do any real research would simply write an article or two, and consider the matter closed. But that doesn’t bring you fame and fortune like Norah Vincent, David Horrowitz or Paul Hackmister. After dressing as a man for 18 months Norah is an expert on men, after, well I’m not sure what kind of research he did besides apparently really hating Columbia University alot, and David is an expert on the slightly less complex and multifaceted topic of liberal professors invading America. The last one was a joke name. To reach that kind of level of expertise, you need to take your one or two good ideas, and find a way to streeeeecccchhhh them. So here’s how the Daily show is bad for America. It reinforces our laziness when it comes to processing information. The reason more people enjoy listening to Jon Stewart interview someone than say Terry Gross isn’t just that his name isn’t Gross. It’s that he inserts a joke every 5 seconds. In our spastic, short attention span, advertising driven culture, we need a joke every 45 seconds or we grow impatient. {insert some research here that everyone already knows- backing up the shorter attention spans theory} It’s the News equivalent of a book chalk full of dialogue and short paragraphs. Whenever an interview on the Daily Show inadvertently strays too long, viewers begin to feel a little uncomfortable. But since it’s a News program, they can always congratulate themselves on being informed. In other words, the show does an admirable job of being a sugar coating through which the medicine can go down. We as Americans need this information. It’s vital to our democracy {insert some stuff from Civics 101 well informed citizenry and all that} and the Daily Show does help increase our awareness about issues. More importantly, it’s a show, like MST3000 before it, that the more you know, the more you can get out of it. In fact, it’s a good, entertaining show. I like it a lot. But when Jon Stewart protests that it’s just a comedy show, not a substitute for real journalism, he’s right. When Americans proudly proclaim that they get most of their information from it, it’s like bragging that we can’t read, or can’t do math. Which we also tend to do. When Jon Stewart protests that the Daily Show receiving a Peabody was as much a slap in the face to the rest of journalism as it was an award to them, he’s also right. In fact, Mr. Stewart is a pretty smart guy. The whole staff is, and the show, as I admitted above, does a wonderful job of doling out real information… so it can get to the punch line. Let me be magnanimous here. Not only does the show provide context for it’s jokes, it also has teeth. Part of the very real attraction, and the reason I get most of my news from the Daily Show, is that it provides a semi-consistent viewpoint. Much like Fox news, only less insane. The fact that it even HAS a viewpoint puts it head over heals above most news shows {insert a bunch of facts I stole from What Liberal Media by Eric Alterman} Hand in hand with that comedic viewpoint, is the fact that they actually do research. When the President directly contradicts himself, they roll tape from both speeches. When things devolve into a He-said She-said argument, they go ahead an give relevant facts to help settle the debate rather than simply cover the argument. When public figures entrusted with protecting the American say obviously crazy things, they point that out. But they do that for a joke. So is the Daily Show bad for America? Well… when Jon Stewart protests that the Daily Show receiving a Peabody was as much a slap in the face to the rest of journalism as it was an award to them, he’s right. In the meantime when I, like most of the American public, don’t have the time and effort to research every single issue myself, the Daily show is one of the few places I can turn to for reporters who have done some homework, and present a coherent view. Albeit with a comedic edge. So why is this book entitled How the Daily Show is Bad for America if I like it so much? Because liberal books aren’t selling this year. {Insert 300 page fantasy novel} |