Stewart on Fox News Sunday

I’ve watched Jon Stewart’s interview on Fox News Sunday and it’s difficult to understand how these people can get away with what they do. It seemed like Jon and Chris Wallace were talking about different things. Asked by Jon, Wallace said that he thought Jon’s highest aspiration was to be a political player, which Stewart disagreed, but that didn’t seem to convince Wallace. Well, he’s entitled to his opinion, just like anybody else can disagree on the “fair and balanced” slogan and disagree on the fact that Fox News is a news organisation. I certainly don’t believe in it, even though they constantly tell me that they are “the most powerful name in news.”

During the interview, Wallace tried to compare Stewart’s work with their work at Fox and tried to find a common ground, which is something that anybody with half a brain cell would never do. Jon said that programmes like his were a counterweight to Hannity and Beck to give the channel some credibility, and later on Wallace asked about Comedy Central, to make the point that in any place, “there is good and bad stuff.” To prove that, he showed a clip from the roasting of Pamela Anderson on Comedy Central, and also mentioned South Park as being some of the bad stuff on the air. He ended up telling Stewart that next time he mocks Fox News, he should think about the place he works at. Right. So, according to Wallace, it’s fair to liken Hannity to Pamela Anderson’s roasting, correct? Good and bad stuff on the air. Wallace also said Jon was biased because he “only tells part of the story.” Is Jon Stewart supposed to tell the full story? Does Chris Wallace or anybody on his network realise that the name of the channel is COMEDY Central? They’re basically trying to legitimise what they do by saying that everybody else has a liberal bias and that Jon Stewart doesn’t tell the full story. It’s just beyond my comprehension.

What Stewart was trying to say throughout the interview was that he mocks the absurdities that are put on air, mostly by cable news. He mentioned the Nancy Pelosi press conference after Weiner had resigned, calling all the three networks’ (Fox, CNN, MSNBC) bullshit when they stopped airing the press conference after she made it clear she wouldn’t comment on Weiner. All three. So there is definitely a lot of bad stuff on TV in general, but when it comes to not reporting facts and pushing agendas, Fox News happens to be champion.

Here’s the full interview, parts one and two. (UPDATE: The videos have been removed from YouTube, but the interview can still be watched through the link at the top of the post.)

News in 2010

After a few months of really hard work and insomnia and not meeting deadlines, I finally got a few days off. No big plans for these days, apart from catching up with some studying and watching some news. News…

So, this morning I was watching Fox & Friends and they showed images of an apparent riot at Moscow airport because people have been stranded there for days because of weather conditions, as have folks in the US and Europe. You can see the Euronews report here. Of course people are pissed off, nobody likes to spend even one hour waiting for an airplane. The problem with Fox & Friends was that, as they were showing the images of people protesting in Moscow, the hypothetical questions started and they were something like: ‘could we see something like this in NYC? People have been at the airport for three, maybe four days here, so could this be a possibility? If the situation continues, people might start doing the same…’

I saw the same story on CNNI, they showed the same images, but instead of coming up with hypothetical things and making audiences think, ‘uh, this WAS President Obama’s fault, he should be shoveling snow off the tarmac right now!’, I actually learned what was going on there.

This is something that really pissed me off this year: the hypothetical news, the passionate-blogger news, the no news-value news. And they’re everywhere.

I’m a big fan of Twitter, for me it’s the best way to compile all the organizations or people you want to get news from, but I guess in the urge of producing more and more content you can see stuff that, well, should be left unsaid, like when our local newspaper Correio do Povo reports something like: “Beach vacationers enjoy the day walking along the shoreline”. If you knew what the shoreline really looks like in my state, you’d be running like hell from it. (Oh, so maybe THAT’s the news! People enjoying themselves on the awful beach shore!)

Photo taken in Imbé

This year was definitely Jon Stewart’s year. Having a comedy show, it’s obviously easy for him to make fun of the absurdities that politicians and pundits say, but the different thing about him is that the show researches and checks facts before putting something on the air and one of his biggest trademarks is the sound bites shown to contradict what somebody is now saying so passionately on TV (this is now being used by AC360. Couldn’t have he done this before?) Anyway, one of my favorite moments was the ‘republicans will ride in the “back of the car”/”back of the bus” thing’. In the failed attempt to get people to vote in midterm elections, Obama said he wouldn’t give the car keys back and GOP would have to sit in the back of the car. Well, guess what Fox News reported…?

They simply progressively replaced “car” by “bus” and this obviously became a racial issue. The whole Jon Stewart segment can be seen here, really worth watching!!! What makes me angry is the progressive change, you know? Slowly and subtly during the hard news, and then boooom! Obama wants to send all Americans to concentration camps. In the back of the bus.

But I think one of the most outrageous passionate-blogger pieces of news was Obama’s trip to Asia last month. It all started with this Michelle Bachmann’s interview on AC360:

And it all turned out to be complete bullshit spread by those talk radio guys that for some reason have millions of listeners. That piece on AC360 actually generated comments on the NY Times, basically saying good job for the fact-checking.

It’s unbelievable that now pieces on good reporting are not given to Watergate-like articles or war stories, but to reports that straighten out fake/not fact-checked ones.

Almost forgot how mad Glenn Beck is…

Spending most afternoons at work, and most of them doing overtime, it has been ages since I last saw a Glenn Beck show. With the timezone difference down to only one hour between NY and Porto Alegre — wow, for a split second it even sounded as if Porto Alegre was a place worth mentioning… — his programme starts at 6pm, and I’m usually at the school or on my way home, so I don’t get to see it. My co-worker even says a “thank God” now and then when I say I can’t watch the show anymore. Well, I agree with my co-worker in many aspects, and not seeing his show kind of made me forget how insane he is. So, as I was at home preparing the meal for tomorrow, and it was 6:15pm, I went, “why not?”

He was of course blasting the “socialist” media, that you know, write about him and write about people that seem not to enjoy what he says and thinks — basically what Fox News does with everybody that’s not a Tea Partier (or a sympathizer), right-wingers and radio talk show hosts — something that, again, contradicts his ideas of “freedom” and “no government control whatsoever”. Shouldn’t he be OK with the fact that, by saying things that would cause a bit of a distress in some people, such as encouraging parents to take children out of school, he would probably be the target of a lot of criticism? But the topper was during his show today. He so passionately delivers his crazy, non-sense stuff, almost preaching, that he managed to link Obama with Satan! This is really, really sad, you know, what people are capable of doing for ratings. And as I said before, what’s even sadder is that people believe that kind of stuff.

Well, you might think that I’m one of the ones that gives the guy those ratings, and as Jon Stewart would say, “guilty as charged…” But you cannot ignore that this guy is big and it helps me understand what’s been going on there, you know, when crazy Arizona bills get passed or when commentators get surprised that Obama’s ratings go up five points or when Bill O’Reilly devotes huge amounts of time grilling the “liberal” media and says that Fox News is the “fair and balanced” news network — and he includes himself into the mix… — and the other networks just don’t show what people are interested in, what people want. And, as “the trusted name in news” that they now are, Fox News can simply say whatever they want and support whatever groups and parties and simply get away with “we’re number 1”. I think that’s happening a lot lately.

I guess, once again, I turn to Stewart…

30-hour day for some 10 days would be perfect…

Never thought would have so much to do and such little time. We’re traveling next week to Santa Cruz and haven’t finalized all the activities yet. I believe I’m switching to panic mode between tomorrow and Wednesday if we don’t at least come up with the topics. We decided to split two days and do four shorter activities instead of the whole-day thing previously proposed. And obviously folks at the company called me all day but couldn’t reach me because I was involved in classes and meetings the whole day.  Needless to say that I’m pretty beat by now — it’s only Monday! — and I’ll only be able to relax a bit after the 18th — boy, will I celebrate the end of “Special Edition”!

Last week I was “asked” to leave the teachers’ lounge and move to the directors’ room, where the Corporate Coordinator works and the directors occasionally stay when they’re at the school. Today, one of them arrived and I offered my table, she refused. The room is ok but internet connection not so much. For some reason I had no internet access throughout the whole day, having one million things to do in between classes. If that becomes a pattern, well, it’s not gonna be good for anybody…

Also, I don’t think I like being in the “east wing”, you know, while all my material, the books, the printer and everything else is in the “west wing” of the building. I gotta admit, though, that staying in the teachers’ lounge can cause a little bit of distress at times. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a teacher as well and love chatting and exchanging ideas with my peers, but sometimes it’s virtually impossible to get some work done with lots of people speaking non-stop around you. One thing that I observed being in the same room as the Corporate Coordinator is that basically she’s passing on wrong information about the programme, so I must talk to her urgently otherwise it could be bad… One thing that wasn’t bad at all was the feedback from one “immersee”  we had last week, who happens to be the VP for one big company from outside Porto Alegre. The guy wants to have 20 more hours of class before his trip to Asia, which is awesome — expand services to his employees in the near future perhaps? — but we basically covered everything in 20 hours, so I’m not sure what could be done. Speaking of which, there are people at the school that are unwilling to, you know, do their job, meaning preparing classes. Do they expect me to have everything ready for them, so that they can just get the material, get in class and do their thing? Well, I don’t think so, my dear…

I saw this piece in NYT about the future of network news. Is there really anything that could be done in times of Facebook and Twitter and quality online content and livestream news — I get BBC World, Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle English, rfi English, Euronews and many more online — to save network news, not only in the US but worldwide? Let’s not forget that after Haiti’s earthquake, for many hours the population was basically providing all the images and videos seen on CNN and other channels. It’s hard to compete with 24-hour news channels when you are allowed only 22 minutes, there’s no way you can’t be superficial. Plus, there’s been a bigger contribution from regular folks — “iReporters” — in this process (Haiti’s example and most recently, Chile). If you have a camera and happen to be at the right place at the right time, do you really need a news crew to broadcast the event? A lot of job losses forecast, the job of correspondents might become something to be remembered dearly in the near future and more and more freelance reporters will be on the news and bringing the world’s stories to our TV sets/computer screens.