1/24/2007

I have been collecting sources on The Daily Show for a point I want to make in my ongoing project on videoblogs. So here they are. If you know of interesting scholarly discussions of fake news that I don't mention below--especially from cultural/media studies approaches--don't hesitate to send them my way. (Basically I'm interested in the way that some videoblogs adopt conventions of fake news: adopting a parodic tone of mock seriousness; using comic techniques like when Jon Stewart has a conversation with news clips, answering politicians' sound-bites with critical retorts; functioning as a filter for the day's stories.)

-Wikipedia: The Daily Show. All Wikipedia entries should be so comprehensive.

-Ars Technica: "The Daily Show is as substantive as the 'real' news." This is a report on a study by Julia R. Fox, who teaches at Indiana University, of coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign. Fox found that TDS showed longer campaign-related segments and devoted more of each half hour program to campaign issues than the network news shows.

-A.V. Club: interview with Steve Carrell about various topics including the process of working as a "correspondent" for TDS.

-Columbia Journalism Review: interview with Jon Stewart from 2003, mostly about appealing to young people. Ends with this zinger: "I think you can make really exciting, interesting television news that could become the medium of record for reasonable, moderate people. And I think it hasn't even been tried, quite frankly."

-Transcript of Bill Moyers's interview with Jon Stewart: Moyers asks whether TDS is an old form of parody and satire or a new form of journalism.

-The Daily Show and the Reinvention of Political Journalism (pdf) is a conference paper by Geoffrey Baym, who later published a longer version as "The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism" in Political Communication 22: 259-276. Baym argues that rather than accepting the notion that TDS is "fake news," we should think of it as a form of alternative journalism that allows for greater criticism than standard news formats and promotes deliberative democracy.

-Entertaining Politics: New Political Television and Civic Culture by Jeffrey P. Jones, a book about TDS, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, and Dennis Miller Live.

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