Under the headline, “Jon Stewart, Enemy of Democracy?”, Richard Morin starts:
This is not funny: Jon Stewart and his hit Comedy Central cable show may be poisoning democracy.
Things are, in the parlance of my late friend Jim Smith, fucked up worse than polio, and it is all Jon Stewart’s fault?
Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart’s faux news program, “The Daily Show,” develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.
Whatever cynical views young people develop with regard to voting are because of “The Daily Show”? Are you sure it isn’t the fact that the media and the politicians are in a gropefest?
To test for a “Daily Effect,” Baumgartner and Morris showed video clips of coverage of the 2004 presidential candidates to one group of college students and campaign coverage from “The CBS Evening News” to another group. Then they measured the students’ attitudes toward politics, President Bush and the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).
The results showed that the participants rated both candidates more negatively after watching Stewart’s program. Participants also expressed less trust in the electoral system and more cynical views of the news media, according to the researchers’ article, in the latest issue of American Politics Research.
“Ultimately, negative perceptions of candidates could have participation implications by keeping more youth from the polls,” they wrote.
Gee, you think? So, the problem isn’t the fact that we have politicians who are money-whores, the problem is that a show on basic cable can’t put a shine on shit?
Here’s the problem. We have a freedom of the press that is written into the Bill of Rights. That freedom is there based on the expectation that the press is going to inform the voters, being that well informed voters are essential to the proper functioning of a democracy. But what was press in the early days of this country has become the media. Media exists to sell advertising. And when the media tell the truth, advertising revenues may suffer. Rights don’t exist in a vacuum, and the freedom of the press was understood to be balanced by the responsibility to tell the truth. But the media doesn’t do that any more.
Young people become cynical when they get an understanding of the group grope that is going on between politicians and media personalities.