Unbiased Humor

What we see on the news today can be easily questioned. Not necessarily for its lack of accuracy but more so for its amount of opinion and bias that goes into each story. Today that can be seen as the case for almost every single news outlet available in mass media, including television. News stations are owned by many of the same people and therefore what is said and what is left out is mediated by a small group that controls the stations. Their opinions become what is heard on the news and as a result become accepted truths.
Often what happens is that these “truths” are then taken as a joke, or in the Daily Show’s case, a means to an end. They take whatever happens in the news and use it in turn to make people laugh. Words are not twisted and stories are not told from a different angle, but rather the stories are re-read with an emphasis on the ridiculousness of the news to make people laugh.
A great example of this would be on the world’s most recent and newest outbreak, The Swine Flu. In an article in the USA Today, Obama announces that the swine flu is being renamed the H1N1 flu because the pork industry does not want to their sales to decrease. Also discussed in this article is the fact that Israel is calling the disease the Mexican Flu because pork is not kosher. In this article, many credible people are quoted and cited, yet The Daily Show does not fail to poke fun at the outlandish ways of the news. Jon Stewart simply re-reads this information and adds blips that make the whole situation seem mundane and ridiculous. The question must then be asked: How important is this information to begin with? Do people take these “epidemics” too far ad over react?
In Rachel Smolkin’s article in the American Journalism Review, “What The Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart,” she reveals why The Daily Show can be seen as being more credible even though they claim no credibility. The Daily Show has much more leeway than that of any other news show because it is seen as strictly comedy so they are at a liberty to say the truth or read the news with less bias because they can always fall back on the comedy excuse should people be upset by what is being reported. This can be used to the shows advantage by not only reporting the news from a minimally biased standard, but it also gives the show the liberty to poke fun at the other news outlets for their outlandish ways of trying to please the higher corporations.
Another person who realizes that all news can become garbled is Gene Weingarten from the Washington Post. In his article, Cruel and Usual Punishment, he discusses information overload and how that information is presented on television. How each station he viewed told a the same story from different perspectives. Really it was whoever was in control of the station told the news from their biased opinion. Gene Weingarten describes the mesh of information as, “Overwhelmed with words and imagery, harangued with opinion and beset by twaddle”. To be forced to watch this as credible news every night can be more of a form of torture. And it is for that reason that more and more people find themselves watching The Daily Show for actual news.
Though it is true that The Daily Show is a more unbiased source of news even though it is mainly satire, it is a bit unfair to say that these news anchors are at fault. Many of them would probably prefer to present the news from a different stand point but cannot due to the fact that they have to answer to a man in charge. They must do what the boss says or they find themselves without a job. It is with this that I will end by saying that not only does Jon present the news from a more unbiased angle, but he is given permission to do so with the excuse of comedy.