The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, Essay Example

The popularity of comedy presentations of current events, such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, are perhaps symptomatic of two main trends in the relationship between the American public and the news media. On the one hand, it could be argued that current events and politics lend themselves to a comical treatment, to the extent that there is a certain farcical element to the political process itself. Namely, these shows’ popularity reflects a basic cynicism of the general population to how politics works and what it claims to do. On the other hand, the proliferation of these shows perhaps also emphasizes that the mainstream media has failed to properly cover political events: many people watch these comedic substitutes instead of official news broadcasts, to the extent that they offer a different perspective on news events outside of the mainstream rhetoric.

From the point of view of this second reason, we can perhaps analyze the question concerning how effective these shows are at covering the news. Namely, every news story may be framed in a different manner, as a certain narrative. The mainstream media frames the news in a way that is complicit with the dominant discourse: they say what the powers that be want to say. The comedic shows give us a different type of narrative perspective on events, and for this reason, their value is not in how thoroughly they cover the news, but rather that they offer precisely this new perspective and different narratives. Certainly, a comedy program will always be limited in terms of how it treats the news, because it must frame its story with an emphasis on humor. However, this does not prevent the viewer from encountering entirely new perspectives on events, which is extremely valuable for a diverse and healthy media landscape.