The Absurdity of the "News"

Is it that our world, or at least the presentation of it, is so absurd that many people, especially the well-informed, are increasingly turning to satire for help sifting through the truthiness of the news? It's an interesting question that someone smart should look into. However, I, for one, am wagering that it has something to do with stories like this one: David Barstow winning a Pulitzer Prize for two stories, one of which

revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.

This, all according to the Pulitzer Committee.

Glenn Greenwald, an extremely intelligent and accomplished writer condescends to ask the five dollar question that the "serious media" have yet to answer: "By whom were these 'ties to companies' undisclosed and for whom did these deeply conflicted retired generals pose as "analysts"?

And the answer?

"ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox -- the very companies that have simply suppressed the story from their viewers."

He goes on to remind us how Barstow's story led to a congressional inquiry, and yet those same media companies remain silent about their own roles----by now an avalanching, egregiously unethical lack of disclosure (Not so much as a fake apology, like we might expect after the half-hearted mea culpas we heard after the government lured them into arguably the largest, most expensive bait and switch in American history: see Second Invasion of Iraq).

The irony of Brian Williams recently mentioning, without specificity, the prize for an article that implicated him personally, and his network, NBC----where one of the co-opted, Pentagon-dubbed "message force multipliers" still works----is too much for any marginally-informed person possessing high school reasoning capabilities not to turn to satire for sustenance, if not sanity.

Of course, then there's the "liberal" CNN, who ran an 898 word story mentioning practically every other Pulitzer winner except Barstow.

So why are the well-informed turning to satire? Again, despite my intrigue, I don't know, but the numbers are clear that the "high knowledge group" prefer The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to CNN, Fox News, and the network evening news. Here from a 2007 study at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press:



What's interesting about these numbers is that even though 31% of The Daily Show's audience graduated from college, 54% of its audience is classified as "high knowledge" compared to the 38% of the nightly news, and 35% nationwide (This indicates a difference between the educated and informed. Shocker: going to college isn't enough to make one informed). Also, The O'Reilly Factor is at 51% compared to his network as a whole, Fox News, at 35% (Is O'Reilly satire too, though he might not know it?).

The study tells us what we already know but need confirmed:

Well-informed people do gravitate to particular places, but they also make use of a much wider range of news sources than do the less informed.

Although it concludes that "differences in background characteristics and overall news habits do not explain all of the differences in knowledge across news audiences" by pointing out that

the audiences for the comedy shows, The O'Reilly Factor, the web sites of national newspapers, and NPR all have significantly higher knowledge scores than the average.

Interestingly, with regards to Colbert, political ideology----let's say conservatism----doesn't prevent the audience from enjoying his satire. How absurd is that! According to "The Irony of Satire," a study from Ohio State University, people see what they want to see in Colbert's political satire:

conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.

Still more amazingly, "conservatism significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism." Is that absurd, or is it just that the subject matter (our world) is so absurd as to create ambiguity (The study curiously categorized Colbert's "political messages" as "ambiguous").

Colbert "pretends to be joking" and dislikes liberalism? Not likely. In fact, read his out-of-character interviews. Those views, sadly, are not well recognized in what is now loosely called conservatism.

But that's almost besides the point: What is it then that unites both sides in thinking that Colbert is their man? Well, the analysis showed

that perceptions of Colbert's political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.

Could simply being well-informed and attaining at least a high school ability to think logically be enough to necessitate our best conveyor of the absurd (i.e. our world)----satire!----for the presentation of the news?

I don't know, but clearly, there is a case to be made about the absurdity of the "news."