Who even cares?

Why must the likes of TV3 rabbit on about the "golden rules" of politics? Apparently Phil Goff has broken them by acknowledging that Labour are behind in the polls and that they might lose the election and by discussing leadership after Helen Clark steps down.

What are these golden rules? They're just a buzz-phrase that reporters/journalists throw out that have no real significance in, well, anything. Phil Goff does something different, like stating the obvious and suddenly he's broken the golden rules. He might as well have raped a table. The media are just trying to make a mountain out of a molehill (to use an often-used phrase).

It's a pity that we live in an environment where the media are looking to grab onto anything to make a story out of. It would be so much nicer to live in a world where things were less sensationalised and rather have more intelligent discussion going on. I guess this just doesn't add up to big dollars for the media though. Pity.

Quality Journalism from Jon Stewart

Lee Sigelman @ The Monkey Cage has a post commenting on a report by the "Project for Excellence in Journalism" on The Daily Show. (which screens in NZ on C4 Tue-Fri 10pm)

The Daily Show is one of my favourite shows but the idea that it should be taken as journalism is laughable. It's a comedy show that works as a meta-text rather than an actual text as it spends most of its time looking at the media's coverage of events rather than the actual event.

This report happened because in a poll of which journalists were admired the most, host Jon Stewart came in fourth. Really, this is reflective of the state of the rest of media rather than on the Daily Show. The questions that the report should be asking is why does no one admire the media anymore?

An interesting stat though on the front page...

Daily Show viewers are highly informed, an indication that The Daily Show is not their lone source of news. Regular viewers of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report were most likely to score in the highest percentile on knowledge of current affairs.

Seems that people who watch the show are quite likely to get their news from other sources as well and are able to distinguish between satire and reality.

The conclusions of the report seem to be: The Daily Show has a skewed focus on Washington politics and can completely ignore other big stories (such as the Virginia Tech shootings - with good reason, there is nothing funny about that). The Daily Show also has a liberal bias, the show producers say this is because the show is anti-establishment. It'll be interesting to see if the show changes if Obama wins the White House in November.

Finally, I pulled up the Wikiquote page for The Daily Show, it has a section that has some taglines. Let's see how The Daily Show defines itself:

• More people get their news from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart... Than probably should.
• The Daily Show - the only news program with no credibility left to lose.
• The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. We're getting a helicopter... soon.
• The Most Important News Show... Ever.

Money...

No Right Turn talks about social dividends and Universal Basic Incomes here. I've always loved this idea. A pity that no one implements so that we can see if it works in the real world.

As an aside, he also talks about the Qantas Media Awards in another post. (A congratulations to No Right Turn for being nominated) But it's nice that the Otago Daily Times is no longer winning Best Newspaper in the country. Because, quite frankly, it's not. And (for the last five years at least) it was never the Best Newspaper.