(Video) Jon looks back on the last eight presidents that have gone on television and promised to move America towards an energy-independent future. Full Story »
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No less than the Pew Center has looked at the news value of Jon Stewart. and concluded that "The Daily Show aims at more than comedy. In its choice of topics, its use of news footage to deconstruct the manipulations by public figures and its tendency toward pointed satire over playing just for laughs, The Daily Show performs a function that is close to journalistic in nature—getting people to think critically about the public square. In that sense, it is a variation of the tradition of Russell Baker, Art Hoppe, Art Buchwald, H.L. Mencken and other satirists who once graced the pages of American newspapers." I'm not sure within the format how he would have incorporated the reasons for the non-progress. However, in checking ... More »
Interesting commentary on President Obama's call for energy independence from the Daily Show. This short video segment cites earlier calls for reducing our oil dependency by 8 former U.S. presidents -- and asks why these plans haven't worked out yet. While making an important point about these repeated failures, this opinion doesn't offer clear answers about their causes, nor about solutions to this problem.
his approach is comedy and put down ....his seems the lone voice demanding accountability on network TV. Shows how sad and desperate our nation has become.
This at least accomplishes reminding us of the historical context behind our energy problems, and in an entertaining way.
Politicians are really going to start hating video cameras--with some justification. Stewart is a master at using their own words against them, and shows that mastery again here.
A a reporter myself, I've always believed "entertain and inform" are my two jobs. Not "bore and teach." Got that? So yeah. This was a fine opinion piece, right down to the end, where it revealed the truth about Richard Nixon's communist leanings -- at least by today's tea-smoking party standards.
Speaking truth to power is the essential responsibiity of the journalist, and it's no less important if it is funny. Satire, when combined with accurate reporting, can be powerful political journalism, which this is. I can't imagine any Comedy Central viewers so unsophisticated that they can't recognize that the cut-up collage of Presidential news clips was created to make a point, even to the point of distorting what the Presidents were trying to say. There is little dispute that eight US Presidents were recorded saying that they would lead the US into energy dependence. At the end, the true enumeration of the environmental policies put into place by Richard Nixon make a point about how far to the right American political ... More »
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