10 - I Am the Mainstream Media (and So Can You!): The Hyperreality of “Fake News”

Summary

On its February 10, 2010 broadcast, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart opened with a satirical monologue in which Stewart explored the possible slogans that a “fake news” program on the Comedy Central television network might use in covering the day’s leading story, a massive snowstorm blanketing the eastern seaboard of the United States. Employing what should be recognized as nonsense words appropriate to such a venue (and, by contrast, words that should be entirely inappropriate for “real news” programs), Stewart begins to introduce the terms Snowmageddon, Snowpocalypse, and eventually Snowtorious B.I.G., only to be cut off each time by clips of other mainstream network news shows—on CNN, NBC, and MSNBC—using those very words. A mock-chagrined Stewart bemoans the fact that mainstream news channels (the “big boys”), with their greater financial and meteorological resources, have usurped what should have been the birthright of comedy writers on The Daily Show.

The humor in this bit, as with similar segments on almost every other episode of the program, derives from the powerful critique of the mainstream media: What is funny about the piece is not so much The Daily Show’s own writing or comedian Jon Stewart’s performance (although these certainly enhance the experience), but rather that the so-called “real news” programs are so ridiculous. To use phrases like Snowmageddon or Snowpocalypse in a serious news broadcast, with real news to cover, should be viewed as unprofessional, if not shameful. But, far from it, such silliness had by now the actual stuff of mainstream television news. Stewart’s fake news is funny because of its trenchant exposure of just how silly real news actually is. As Jeffrey P. Jones has put it, “As a parody of television news shows, it skewers the absurdity and contradictions that pass for ‘news’.” The key point is not that satirical, fake news is taken as seriously as real news (although hard evidence, as well as hue and cry, suggest it is), but that all “news” has become transformed into entertainment-television that no longer bears much, if any, relation to the “real.”