No Laughing Matter: The Power of Cyberspace to Subvert Conventional Media Gatekeepers (original) (raw)

The Daily Show and Crossfire: Satire and Sincerity as Truth to Power (Chapter 17)

from Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, ed. Megan Boler, Chapter 17 (MIT Press), 2008

Abstract for book Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, ed. M Boler (MIT Press) "In an age of proliferating media and news sources, who has the power to define reality? When the dominant media declared the existence of WMDs in Iraq, did that make it a fact? Today, the "social web" (sometimes known as Web 2.0, groupware, or the participatory Web)—epitomized by blogs, viral videos, and YouTube—creates new pathways for truths to emerge and makes possible new tactics for media activism. In Digital Media and Democracy, leading scholars in media and communication studies, media activists, journalists, and artists explore the contradiction at the heart of the relationship between truth and power today: the fact that the radical democratization of knowledge and multiplication of sources and voices made possible by digital media coexists with the blatant falsification of information by political and corporate powers. The book maps a new digital media landscape that features citizen journalism, The Daily Show, blogging, and alternative media. The contributors discuss broad questions of media and politics, offer nuanced analyses of change in journalism, and undertake detailed examinations of the use of Web-based media in shaping political and social movements. The chapters include not only essays by noted media scholars but also interviews with such journalists and media activists as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Media Matters host Robert McChesney, and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera."

Public Journalism is a Joke: The case for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert

Journalism: Theory, Method, Practice

Scholars have increasingly turned their attention to understanding and assessing the impact of faux news anchors Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, and Stephen Colbert, host of The Daily Show spinoff The Colbert Report. While important work has been done to illustrate the impact of these shows on political participation and public discourse they are still placed within traditional notions of political knowledge and civic participation. Such characterizations remain incomplete for understanding the lasting role Stewart and Colbert may play in contemporary journalism. In this article I contend that Stewart and Colbert are performing underappreciated roles as public journalists as well as serving to re-envision a mass mediated public journalism for the 21st century. Ultimately, through the use of humor, Stewart and Colbert invite a heightened sense of participation in public life in the contemporary mass mediated landscape, adhering to the principles and promises of public journalism.

Contestation in the Colbert Nation: Participants, Producers and the Struggle over Digital Dialogue

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2014

""This article traces tensions between participants and producers on the official Colbert Report discussion boards. Employing critical discourse analysis, it examines the flow of power between the program’s producers and fans as they struggle over how the parody’s meanings will be interpreted, and how fans’ digital labor and content will be used. I begin by recounting the conflicted history of the message boards, and then analyze a sample of discussion threads in order to illustrate the vibrant and boisterous community created there. Finally, I explore strategies of migration, refusal and offline communication used by participants to express agency and power in relation to the boards’ producers. Throughout, I argue that theoretical approaches to participatory culture must take into account the corporate drive to centralize, manage and profit from users’ communicative desires, as well as audiences’ corresponding efforts to resist such control. ""

Towards a History of Media Conjuncture: The Daily Show, Audience and the "Revolution"

In this paper I am proposing the relinquishing of the notion of "breaking the media value chain" in favor of the concept of "media conjuncture" as used by Antonio Gramsci and subsequently Stuart Hall. By his account, "a conjuncture is a period in which the contradictions and problems and antagonisms, which are always present in different domains in a society, begin to come together. They begin to accumulate, they begin to fuse, to overlap with one another" (2013). By that account, I propose to review the concept of "revolution" in the media chain as constitutive and productive for media conjuncture by appropriating its original Latin meaning of "circling" or "returning", and not of relinquishing or breaking. I will analyze a couple of significant media occurrences that portray possible directions for new media strategies (e.g. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart). In that light, my main goal is to propose that the new media perspective and the appropriation of technology (internet) have changed the nature of the dissemination of information. New media provides a new perspective in which the user is almost always the arbiter of informational usefulness. The functioning of today's media institutions as "objective" and universal becomes dead weight as the idea of information as semantically ambiguous becomes the dominant model of thought. By that account, my analysis will try to show the possible trajectory of new media thinking towards the notion of "information with a face". The "crisis of media", therefore, could be averted by abandoning the idea of unidirectional dissemination of information from the "producers" to their receivers in favor of "nomadic hierarchy" by which the information sphere is always intersubjective (through internet-decentralized participation). Therefore, the question of which contents are user willing to pay in the age of social networks should be remade into that of what specific content is media willing to disseminate in the age of informational ubiquitousness. Deep structural changes in the mediasphere are only reaffirming the age old questions of power relations between culture, economy and information, and their dialectic can be properly viewed only through systemic analysis of their complex historicities. Media institutions must adapt to these new complexities of conjuncture, as their power of controlling the market and the information has decreased substantially proves to be a revolutionary potential in the era of information.

Political Culture Jamming: The Dissident Humor of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Popular Communication, 2007

Contemporary politicians have wholeheartedly embraced commercial branding techniques, saturating the public sphere with market tested, emotional messages designed to cultivate trust in their political "brand," thus working against the ideal of a democratic public sphere. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart "jams" the seamless transmission of the dominant brand messages by parodying the news media's unproblematic dissemination of the dominant brand, broadcasting dissident political messages that can open up space for questioning and critique. The Daily Show works, not by rational argumentation buttressed by facts and logic but by using an aestheticized (and very funny) parodic discourse to combat the aestheticized (and very serious) political branding techniques. Consequently, it is uniquely positioned to make its rebellious voice heard.

The Impudence of Being Earnest: Jon Stewart and the Boundaries of Discursive Responsibility

Journal of Communication, 2013

In late 2010, Jon Stewart attracted considerable news media attention by organizing the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear and, later, pressuring lawmakers to pass legislation providing health care to 9/11 responders. The events renewed an interpretive struggle surrounding Stewart in which journalists understood his activity as signaling a shift in his cultural role. Using the concept of boundary maintenance to qualitatively analyze journalists' interpretations, this study connects journalistic discourse surrounding Stewart to questions of epistemic authority, the role of earnestness in public discourse, and the responsibility of discursive agents. These evaluations of Stewart illuminate the contestation of appropriate norms and practices within the mediated public sphere during an era of complex cultural, economic, and technological change.