Props to The Daily Show

I read this article on the DNC news coverage from the New York Times. I was shocked to find two paragraphs devoted entirely to highlighting The Daily Show’s coverage of the convention, praising Jon Stewart as a “compass to convention coverage.”

What’s wrong with this picture?

The Daily Show is a fake news program staffed comedians pretending to be journalists in order to get a laugh. By account of any politico, the major party conventions are serious business. Comedians making fun of a political convention is certainly not news. The New York Times noting a fake news show for their unbiased coverage of the convention while simultaneously scolding the major networks for their self-censored, anorexic coverage of the same convention, is a big deal.

Here is yet more evidence that mainstream politimedia processes are so polarized against one another that they have completely lost touch with reality. As the number of major media/news organizations continues to fall to government-condoned consolidation and profit mongering, those organizations offer less and less content of substance in an effort to maintain the favor of their political allies. With fewer and fewer small, independent outlets to voice dissent, the people are left to sit passively and watch as the two parties fight over a couple polarizing topics which have little importance to the every-day problems they face. The Republicans are pro-life. The Democrats are pro-choice. Their policies on corporate donations and campaign finance reform are the same. The Republicans are anti-tax. The Democrats are pro-fiscal responsibility. The voting record on national health care reform for both is abysmal, and neither of them have a realistic plan to move us out of our unjustified war in Iraq. The Republicans are pro-family. The Democrats are pro-equal rights. Except neither party is really working towards the promotion of homosexual families beyond their status as second-class citizens.

And so we are left with the political parties having boring conventions about issues that don’t really matter to us, simultaneously covered and snubbed by the media outlets whose advertising power put them there in the first place. We are left with a population that has become so cyncial, and a politimedia machine that has so alienated itself from the rest of the nation, that a fake news program staffed by comedians is widely recognized as the bellweather in political convention coverage.

Something has got to change here. Something needs to change here.