Ryan McCarthy has one of the better analyses of Jon Stewart's tenure:
Jon Stewart changed journalism before journalism was ready to change
It’s worth noting that everyone is doing this kind of thing now -- and we don't even bother to call it blogging anymore. In the early and mid-2000s, what mass media commentary existed on policy was being dominated by a handful of emerging blogs. (Ben Smith has a great history of this era here.)
Writers like Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall and Markos Moulitsas, Ezra Klein, Ben Smith and a host of others would follow Stewart's lead in decoding the news. People like Arianna Huffington were starting to make big companies out of the kind of pointed, bloggy commentary that Stewart already offered four nights a week. Like "The Daily Show," each of these new sites had a take on news: each took their own stylistic, journalistic and political approaches to decoding what powerful people were telling us.
Jamelle Bouie is not so sad to see it go:
I grew up with The Daily Show. It hit its stride during the 2004 election—my last full year in high school—and was critical viewing when Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination and then the presidency, my last full year in college. I attended Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in 2010 and have watched the show on a semi-regular basis for almost a decade. And as a liberal, college-educated millennial—the almost prototypical viewer for The Daily Show—I’m thrilled Stewart is leaving.
I’m not saying this because Stewart has given his time or deserves to try something new. I’m saying this because Jon Stewart, with his brand of left-leaning cynicism (sprinkled with occasional earnestness), is a bad example for the liberals who watch and love him.
EJ Dionne:
Since everyone is sophisticated about media, you already know where I’m going. On many front pages Wednesday — I still like print — came the dueling stories of Jon Stewart leaving “The Daily Show” and NBC News’s six-month suspension of Brian Williams.
Be a media critic and ask: Why did I put Stewart first? Because he embodies so many of the changes I’m talking about. He is a gifted comedian, of course, but more than anything else, he is a media critic. He constantly upbraids journalists for how they’ve covered stories, and perhaps more significantly, what they’ve failed to report.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Julia Belluz:
How the Toronto Star massively botched a story about the HPV vaccine
On Thursday, the Toronto Star, one of the largest newspapers in North America and the most-read in Canada, published a story that is everything wrong with vaccine reporting in one dangerous package.
The story was, at its core, a collection of unproven anecdotes that suggested, among other things, that dozens of women north of the border had been harmed or worse by the Gardasil HPV vaccine.
Fallout from that piece (
found here) includes this:
The HPV vaccine was created to prevent an infection that causes cancer. That is pretty exciting. After all, Terry Fox’s arduous marathon a day was to raise money for a cancer cure. Did he even imagine that we would have a vaccine to prevent cancer?
Given the power of HPV vaccine to prevent disease and death, a long Toronto Star article that appears to suggest that the HPV vaccine causes harm is troubling and disappointing. Although the article states in the fifth paragraph that “there is no conclusive evidence showing the vaccine caused a death or illness,” its litany of horror stories and its innuendo give the incorrect impression that the vaccine caused the harm.
Very unfortunately, this article may well lead readers to doubt both the scientific evidence and the recommendations of the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization, and the Canadian Cancer Society about vaccination.
And includes
this:
For a week, The Toronto Star has been taking criticism over a story detailing health problems experienced by young women after they took the HPV vaccine. Some in the medical community called it alarmist and scientifically-unsound. The publisher, John Cruickshank, now says the paper failed the public and let them down.
Cruickshank tells As It Happens host Carol Off that he takes responsibility for the way the story was presented.
"We failed in this case. We let down. And it was in the management of the story at the top," he says.
Cruickshank says the headline -- "A wonder drug's dark side" -- was wrong. That the front page play for the story was a mistake. And he notes that the piece mentions several times that the paper has no evidence that the anecdotes it presented were caused by the HPV vaccine Gardasil.
He says he understands why readers would wrongly take away from the piece that the drug is dangerous.
Next steps @TorontoStar: Actually apologize for that story, correct/retract,have Cooke apologize for how he addresses readers @kathyenglish
— @juliaoftoronto
Jason McDaniel with two terrific posts looking at the GOP candidates.
First:
Is Scott Walker too ideologically extreme for the Republican Party?
And the
second McDaniel piece:
The case for Scott Walker
Derek Willis looks at the candidates' ideology based on the money, and complements the pieces above:
To Understand Scott Walker’s Strength, Look at His Donors
There Is Room to the Right of Jeb Bush
Using ideological measures created by Crowdpac, Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor, has a more conservative rating than Jeb Bush and most other potential Republican presidential candidates.
Ed Kilgore:
But beyond the context of Christian-Islamic rivalry and comparative assessments of religious violence, Obama was also quietly but forcefully continuing an intra-Christian argument over clarity of God’s Will and whether those who assert they know it in detail are exhibiting faithful obedience or arrogant self-righteousness. There’s no question where the president stands on the question:
I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt—not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.