In the shittily-titled article
Jon Stewart, Enemy of Democracy?, Richard Moran advances the thesis that viewers of the Daily Show, often young, are prone to cynicism and unfavorable impressions of politicians and the system in general. He hypothesizes that this is to the detriment of democracy, as his leading title indicates.
To put it succintly this is utter horseshit as the following makes clear
In fact, Daily Show viewers have higher campaign knowledge than national news viewers and newspaper readers -- even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age, and gender are taken into consideration.
Source: Business Journal
Whence cometh this disparity?
I have a few opinions on the flip.
* My apologies for using an "objective" question to state my opinion in a thinly veiled way. I shudder to think what would happen if this practice got any traction in "real" journalism.
Ok, Mr. Morin, if you're reading this (unlikely) let me walk you through a little bit of logic.
Your (simple-minded) article seems to run like this:
Premise 1: TDS viewers are cynics.
Premise 2: Cynicism is anathema to a healthy democracy.
Conclusion: QED, TDS viewers have a negative effect on democracy.
If we step back and acknowledge that they are well-informed, it might be worth asking whether the dangers of cynicism outweigh those of an ill-informed populace.
I think that the answer to this, at least from those of us in the reality-based community of political thinking, is that it's better to be a cynic than naïve.
To me this opinion piece does nothing but bemoan the lack of young people watching less-than-informative broadcasting that minimizes the imporatance of potentially damaging facts about politicians and their corporate/media benefactors.
I don't know about you, but Mr. Morin convinced me. I'm never gonna watch that evil Daily Show again, because the facts that Jon Stewart reports hate America so much.
Thankfully, with enough pieces like this we can banish facts to Europe along with the homosexuals and liberals and let obfuscation and unquestioning alliegance to corporate despots reign across this great land