News, young people and comedy

There has been a lot of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over the research suggesting that young people get most of their “hard” news from the late night comedy shows. The Chronicle of Higher Ed, for instance, reports that “more than one-third of Americans under 30 now get their news primarily from late-night comedians, and that 79 percent of this age group (and half of the adult population generally) say they sometimes or regularly get political information from comedy programs such as Saturday Night Live or nontraditional outlets such as MTV.” (April 19, 2002, Chron).

While I don’t think that any one source is ever the ONLY source people should go to for news (which is why I love the Net — particularly CommonDreams, GoogleNews, and so on), I don’t think that the late night comedy shows should be avoided, either. Check out the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I just spent fifteen minutes laughing out loud at their coverage — of the state of the union address (which included an interview with Sen. John McCain), of the primary campaigns, of environmental issues. Sometimes laughter is the only thing that prevents me from crying — and this show, at least, only makes sense if you have some grasp of what’s going on.

Perhaps what we need to focus on — in this era of media monopolies — is finding different models for funding the news. Herbert Gans writes: “Better journalism will cost more, but money has been tight even in good times. News chains and media conglomerates expect profit margins of 20 percent or more. If news is essential to democracy, other business models should be considered. Maybe news should be assigned the status of a utility and not that of the commercial cash cow it now often is. We should examine nonprofit or limited-profit news organizations, special tax write-offs, and even carefully controlled government subsidies.” (April 11, 2003, Chron).

Who knows what models might evolve? We definitely need to do something! In the meantime, making fun of biased coverage (as the Daily Show’s “Corddry Reports” do) is a good place to start.