mass-communication-theory

UNDERSTANDING AND
EVALUATING MASS
COMMUNICATION THEORY
CHAPTER 1
The matter before the court in the June 2009 hearing was the legality of the Barack
Obama administration’s efforts to keep secret notes from an FBI interview with
former Vice President Dick Cheney surrounding his involvement, several years earlier,
in the outing of an undercover CIA operative. The stakes were high—accountability
in our government’s highest elected officials—and U.S. District Judge Emmet
Sullivan was confused. Why would a Democratic president, elected in part on his
promise of greater transparency in government, defend secrets from the previous
Republican administration that he had so vigorously campaigned against as improper?
Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Smith offered the court an explanation:
“I don’t want a future vice president to say, ‘I’m not going to cooperate with you
because I don’t want to be fodder for The Daily Show.’” In other words, elected
officials might not cooperate with criminal investigations for fear of ridicule from
late-night comics. Judge Sullivan was unmoved, demanding “more precise reasons
for keeping the information confidential” (Pickler, 2009).
Fear of late-night comics? Could the likes of The Daily Show and The Colbert
Report, two satirical news programs on cable channel Comedy Central, be so influential
as to become a point of argument in an important federal court case?
Maybe. Network news anchor Brian Williams confesses that The Daily Show has
become “indispensible” in shaping how “real” news operations conduct their business.
“On occasion,” he wrote, “when we’ve been on the cusp of doing something
completely inane on NBC Nightly News, I will gently suggest to my colleagues that
we simply courier the tape over to Jon [Stewart’s] office, to spare The Daily Show
interns the time and trouble of logging our broadcasts that night. That usually gets
us to rethink the inane segment we were planning on airing” (2009). The public
pays attention to these satirical news programs as well. A March 2009 Rasmussen
poll reported that “nearly one-third of Americans under 40 say they get more of
their news from Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and other late night comedy shows
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