[steveBK123]

The blending of comedy/entertainment with news, going back to the GWB era with the Daily Show is a good example of this problem. People consuming junk food thinking they are getting their vegetables.

Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.

[flir]

I think you do political satire - because that's what the Daily Show is - a disservice. Spitting Image (for example) massively shaped people's perceptions of British politicians in the 80s. That Maggie puppet is still an iconic image of the woman herself.

[hylaride]

I'm not even British (I'm Canadian), but am a geopolitical nerd. Spitting Image is one of the best examples of satire that's ever existed in the TV era.

There was a great documentary where a lot of the politicians who were satirized on it explained how much they loved and loathed their portrayals which often affected their prospects: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xiafmh

[criddell]

What do you think about political cartoons in newspapers and elsewhere?

https://firstamendmentmuseum.org/exhibits/virtual-exhibits/a...

[steveBK123]

I'd prefer people still had the attention span to read the news, including the cartoons.

[xpe]

Wanting people to have longer attention spans is not an actionable choice on the menu. But it can be a goal/target.

This is where preferences meet reality. How do you influence the world to work the way you want it to?

[tcbawo]

Is it’s not an either/or proposition. There is a dearth of informed populace. But many of the problems in a modern society are very complex and boring to the majority of people. There is a very small population of informed people. Getting things done requires swaying public opinion and “motivating your base”. Real reporting (presenting or revealing facts), op-ed, comedy, satire are all part of a healthy media ecosystem. But I think one reason for the political divide in the United States is not necessarily a disagreement on policy, but rather the very issues that motivate people on either end of the spectrum are different. It would be great if the population was less impressionable and more informed. But that requires ongoing effort and flies against human nature.

[CuriouslyC]

Frankly the Daily Show/Last Week Tonight are the best news, because the news isn't vegetables to begin with, it's alluring toxic slop that makes us feel like shit when we consume it. At least TDS/LWT make us feel good while getting mildly (and mostly unnecessarily) informed.

[passion__desire]

One problem with mixing comedy with serious news is we undermine the gravity or seriousness with which we should respond. Hardtalk on BBC should be common format so that people go into the show with belief that these are not laughing matter

[gosub100]

The other problem was the overwhelming bias. There was one approved narrative, and the comedians always made jokes that promoted it and disparaged the opposite.

[CuriouslyC]

John Stewart rips into the democrats all the time, just not for being rapacious hypocritical monsters.

[concordDance]

As long as you remember that it's quite possible for a series of true facts to give you a less accurate model of the world.

[afpx]

What's your opinion of John Oliver? I just watched a YouTube video of his show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqK3_n6pdDY. It seemed pretty good, but I'm also very ignorant.

What's the best way to become informed about a topic? Or, is it better to stay ignorant?

[roenxi]

If you just want a medium-intensity tip, whenever a newsman reports on what someone said, look up what that person actually said (in context and with a charitable "best possible interpretation" lens). If the two match up then the reporting is about as good as you'll find anywhere. If you can't find a primary source then there is a very real question of how the newsman figured it out that deserves some reflection.

There are basically 3 grades of reporting - trashy lies, very biased and informative. Misreporting what people actually said is a strong tell of the first two - which can still be fun to read but ultimately they're trying to sell you on something that is probably against your interests.

[Adverblessly]

> trashy lies, very biased and informative. Misreporting what people actually said is a strong tell of the first two

For "biased" rather than outright lies, I think the two most common easily observable techniques I see are:

- Quoting known unreliable sources: "Black people eat human babies! (say KKK leadership)"

- Using passive and active voices to shift blame: "Police shoot and kill bystander during drug bust" vs. "Shots fired during drug bust fatally injured potentially uninvolved man"

[steveBK123]

Read don't watch. Reading is a faster way to ingest information.

Read disparate sources knowing they each have their political biases. That is - explicitly read some right (or left) wing news you don't like as a check & balance on the flavor of news you do like to read.

Understand the difference between the news & editorial side of papers.

I would also note that "business news" (WSJ/Bloomberg/etc) tend to be more just-the-facts than your median WaPo/NYT/Fox/MSNBC/NYPost/LAT.

[gosub100]

He is funny, but only while promoting one side. He will never tell a joke that embarrasses one of his own, he will never point out the idiocy of his own party, just the other.

[Adverblessly]

> What's your opinion of John Oliver? I just watched a YouTube video of his show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqK3_n6pdDY. It seemed pretty good, but I'm also very ignorant.

"Between the years 1939 and 1945 more than 6,000,000 Jews died amid a global surge of fatal diseases." is roughly the level of factual accuracy in that specific episode.

In general, I think even without familiarity of the topics discussed it is easy to see how in every episode John Oliver cherry-picks statistics, presents the opinions of individuals as facts or as widely held opinions and slathers the whole show in adjectives so you know exactly what is the correct opinion you are supposed to hold.

I quite enjoy the show as entertainment, but I would not turn to it as a source of truth or to become better informed about a topic.

[ernst_klim]

> What's the best way to become informed about a topic?

If that question exist, the answer is: be ignorant. If you are involved into the topic, you will be pretty informed. So the question is: should you be involved into the topic in he first place. If true, you go to the Uni, join NGO, join related job or research program and get informed pretty quickly, otherwise it's not worthy. Besides, with contemporary media all you can hope for is getting misinformed.

[dgb23]

John Oliver's program is both funny and informative. "Infotainment" as it's sometimes called.

I think its success can be attributed to how it presents things that are often inherently worrying, controversial or critical. By partially presenting it in a funny way, it's easier to digest.

The reports typically present verifiable sources and quotes - at least in part. But I don't think he is suggesting that he's the arbiter of unbiased truth. There are clear biases, exaggerations and so on. What they choose to cover is also impacted by these biases.

Given all that, it seems more honest and authentic rather than less.

Compare that to (non-satirical) news media that _does_ act as if it's objectively truthful (except for example if pressed in court). Where claims are made _without_ verifiable sources but via punditry and half-truths.

[mandmandam]

Multiple studies over those years showed that The Daily Show watchers were significantly better informed on issues than cable news viewers.

Cable news is the junk food, and TDS showed it to be so bad that even a parody news show could do a better job of informing people, a point made very often by the host. Using it as an example of junk news is missing the point by a rather wide margin.

> Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.

It's all coming from the same six companies, as per the article. It all has a lot of the same messaging - trust the police, the good guys always win, torture is bad but if you have a good reason it's ok, Islam is super scary yo, capitalism is cool actually, being too smart isn't cool, and leave the status quo the fuck alone or get Avengered.

... Turn your brain off at your peril. Junk food can kill. If you really feel the need to watch absolute garbage and ignore the news, you probably need to work less and/or sleep more.

[kaashif]

> Multiple studies over those years showed that The Daily Show watchers were significantly better informed on issues than cable news viewers.

This comment only makes sense if you're trying to imply the Daily Show increases how informed people are.

It seems plausible that causation runs the other way: more informed people are more likely to watch the Daily Show, because then they get all the jokes.

[steveBK123]

Precisely. The Daily Show was a predecessor to Twitter political culture and remains the offline version of it. Blue Flavored Fox News with more laughs.

It's the same political culture of preaching to the already converted and mostly shouting about how bad the other side is. No attempts at persuasion.

[vundercind]

It definitely doesn’t have as big a problem with manufacturing outrage “news” out of nothing at all, like Fox does (and its pal, AM radio). They’ll routinely report ordinary things without history or context in order to imply they’re both new and bad (and they may be bad, but not for the reasons they imply, which often simply aren’t real)

I sometimes wonder if people who compare things like the daily show or John Oliver to Fox News have watched Fox News at all in the last 15 years or so.

[mrbombastic]

There is no doubt a blue bent, but I think the fact that it says on the tin that it is satire gives it a leg up on fox news which purports to be, ya know, news. And I think you’ll find that Jon Stewart at least tries to acknowledge the argument of the other side even more than say CNN. For example he was very willing to acknowledge early on that the concerns about Joe Biden’s age were legitimate before a lot of the other blue leaning media realized they could’nt deny it any more. I’d say Bill Maher and some of the talk shows that have gone political are closer to twitter offline, more focused on gotcha moments than real arguments.

[mandmandam]

The correlation vs causation question is interesting, but not the original topic. Whether smart people avoid corporate news, or corporate news makes people dumber, either way the problem is corporate news.

And TDS is not a great example of that, because from the start it was an explicitly self-aware reaction to the awfulness of corporate news.

[pjc50]

Wasn't there a study which showed that UK tabloid readers were worse informed than people who simply didn't pay attention to the news at all?

[fsagx]

It's not a new observation. More than a century ago, Mark Twain observed: "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."

[mandmandam]

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." -Thomas Jefferson, 1807

As a result of this thread I looked into the first US newspaper and discovered it was shut down after one issue because they printed something a governor didn't like, lol. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publick_Occurrences_Both_Forre...