September 5th, 2008 Daily Show

The first segment is insanely good.

The link goes to the whole show.

Daily Show on Palin and Sexism

Warning: The bits involving Sean Hannity and Dick Morris might make your head explode. Especially you, Brazeale.

NYT Piece on The Daily Show & Jon Stewart

From somewhere in the middle of the piece:

Given a daily reality in which “over-the-top parodies come to fruition,” Mr. Stewart said, satire like “Dr. Strangelove” becomes “very difficult to make.” “The absurdity of what you imagine to be the dark heart of conspiracy theorists’ wet dreams far too frequently turns out to be true,” he observed. “You go: I know what I’ll do, I’ll create a character who, when hiring people to rebuild the nation we invaded, says the only question I’ll ask is, ‘What do you think of ‘Roe v. Wade?’ It’ll be hilarious. Then you read that book about the Green Zone in Iraq” — “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran — “and you go, ‘Oh, they did that.’ I mean, how do you take things to the next level?”

About f***ing time this hit the mainstream. Check it out - if nothing else, the writing in the story is good.

What's wrong with this picture?

What does this say about O'Reilly and Hardball?

NEW YORK (AP) -- A journalism think tank studying "The Daily Show" doesn't believe many people get their news from Jon Stewart - because otherwise they wouldn't get the jokes.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism also said it was surprised at how much the Comedy Central late-night program resembles "The O'Reilly Factor," "Hardball" and other cable news shows in content.

The Washington-based organization asked its researchers to study a year's worth of "The Daily Show" tapes - hardly a grim assignment - after hearing the frequent claim that many young people learn about the world from Stewart instead of more traditional news sources.

Daily Show writer explains strike, makes Viacom CEO look like idiot

Chris Matthews on The Daily Show

This interview has been making the rounds. I just finally saw it.

It's brilliant. It's incredible. It's incredibly brilliant and funny and - and this is the most important part - it is representative of how the mainstream, talking head, Beltway media is so pathetically insane, and as a result, why our the national level of discourse is so disgusting.

(Of course, there are other reasons. But this is so central, so key, that you should watch and learn.)

Chris Matthews has a show on MSNBC called Hardball. He is perhaps THE talking head of the TV media in some ways. It's been known for some time that he has some strange views on sex, gender, and how they relate to politics, but this - this is a window into the mind of someone who, I think, has inverted the relationship of politics to reality: To Matthews, politics creates reality. Reality should aspire to be like politics. Needless to say, I think that view is insane.

Stewart destroys him. Matthews knows, to some extent, that this is happening - and the audience does as well. It's brutal, but it's worth the watch: