Watching Late Night Talk Shows for News: Focus on The Colbert Report

Late night political talk shows have become a very widely excepted medium for news acquisition in recent years. Shows like the Colbert report, the Daily Show, the Tonight Show and Saturday Night live have huge fan bases now that rely on them primarily for news information. Some studies show that the majority of their viewers are between the ages of 18-34 so mostly these are the newest generation looking to them for news. With their increasing popularity the question becomes whether talk shows, primarily meant to be entertaining and funny, are good fountains for current news and information for what’s happening in our political landscape. For this reason I decided to watch for myself November 14^th’s episode of the Colbert report on Hulu and read up on how accurate, current and insightful the news it provided was.

The program headline topic was how the Republican run state governments will change the Affordable Health Care act now that they have the power to create change. Colbert opened up the topic with jokes like “now Republicans are going to do something about it by undoing something about it” and called it the Republican’s “Healthcare Reform, reform”. Colbert went on to mock how  one of the leading architects of Obamacare called US voters stupid in a press conference, and how Republicans make it sound like poor Americans don’t deserve healthcare even if they need it. Over all this topic seemed well explained with full coverage on both sides of the issue, even bringing in a political analyst to show her views on the story and why she believes Obamacare will not die anytime soon. Colbert does a good job of using sarcasm to make it hard to pinpoint where his bias lays usually, but in this episode it was clear he believed the exact opposite, that Obamacare was dead due to the new Republican plans and was happy about it.

At this point I did go ahead and do some research on the topic myself. Looking through articles on the topic by the Washington post and CNN, it seems like there wasn't very much of importance left out of this section of the news. Most the same information was shown on both newspapers and neither seem to get quite as good a job of getting both sides of the issue as Colbert did. Of course this section took up almost half the entire time of the show so it should have been well covered and surprisingly, it was.

Washington Post Article on Republican plans for Obamacare

CNN Article on Republican plans for Obamacare

After that, Colbert went on to his next to topic with the joke “A federal judge Man on Managed to spread gay marriage to my home state of South Carolina”. This lead to many jokes about how he sarcastically detested the idea of Gay Marriage going to South Carolina, such as this one referring to the South Carolina state flag as being  nicknamed the “stars and bars and not the stars and gay bars”. All this was done playfully though and it was clear he was either glad for the ruling or indifferent. This was a short segment of the program and only featured the information on the ruling and the name of the judge who passed the ruling but not much else. When I looked the topic up later on USA Today I found there wasn't much else said about it there than was said on the Colbert show, other than a few more details on how the court session went and such, leading me to believe it was a minor story used to fill up a slow news night.

USA Today Article on the ruling to allow gay marriage in South Carolina

After this the last part of the show was spent interviewing Jennifer Lawrence about the new Hunger Games movies which I hardly consider important news for America to know about so I didn’t think it was too important to include that here. In Conclusion though, at least for the Colbert Report, it seems these shows do a good job of getting the facts down people need to know about news topics and they do something other news mediums usually don’t, make the news interesting to watch. That being said I wouldn't say the Colbert report or any late night talk shows are good substitutes for real news shows and pages, as they’re limited time frame, and entertainment based theme makes it so not much news can be presented on each show. The Colbert Report in this episode was only able to cover 2 news topics in the entire show, there are a lot more than just two news stories going on even just here in America right now, let alone the rest of the world. So although they may be accurate and interesting, no I don’t think late night talk shows should be anyone’s only source for news, and if they are than yes I do believe either researching online or watching true news shows are very much worth the time to supplement what was said in the talk shows.

Media Theories: Focus on Cultivation Analysis

               Like in any other research field, media research has many theories to explain many phenomena that have appeared as new media types make information sharing even easier. Today I’d like to talk about one such theory dealing with the way information and how it affects people due to the way it is portrayed on television. This theory is called the Cultivation Analysis theory which states that television cultivates in viewers a reality similar to the one being portrayed on television. To simplify it, this basically means that people start to take what is told to them on television as fact when it may not be, and may get a somewhat distorted sense of the reality of the topic in question. This also leads into the idea of mean world syndrome which is another theory that TV makes the world seem more dangerous than it is, but today I have another example of Cultivation Analysis.

               Throughout TV and other media, whether in ads aimed at adults or some cartoons aimed at kids or teens we see a lot of over exaggeration of many things. One prime example, and one that has garnered much controversy in past years is the shape of people, both male and female, that are portrayed as attractive on TV. Naturally humans are attracted to people who are physically fit, but media in recent years has gone somewhat overboard, especially with women. Women in magazines and commercials are usually portrayed with figures that are incredibly rare to be born with, or even worse, are digitally enhanced to fit the view of perfection the media wants to think is real and attainable. 

Before and after image of a model who has been photoshoped to be on a magazine cover.

Example of the type of people you see in beauty and wellness ads utilizing people who are unnaturally beautiful and sometimes digitally enhanced

Of course these portrayals are physically impossible for most people to achieve themselves yet the fact that TV says that that portrayal is beautiful makes viewers believe it is which can cause many psychological issues in the viewers. These portrayals cause people to aspire to be something they can’t be to the point of picking up dangerous, self-threatening habits. All of this to try and fit this image of perfection that they see and have accepted as the reality of what they should be, simply because that is what media tells them perfection is. It’s not only magazines and people on TV either, some cartoons such as animes, have over sexualized and unrealistic images of what people should look like as well. These may be argued as less harmful for adults but for kids or teens the affect might be the same.

Example of women from a popular anime who are drastically over sexualized and drawn very unrealistically beautiful.

 This is a prime example of the media cultivation effect I believe, as for the most part media producer’s plan these unrealistic ideas of perfection to draw in consumers to buy products that will help them reach the type of beauty they see on TV.

Ads like these basically say if you buy our product you can be this beautiful too!

This is most commonly seen in women’s commercials as producers try to get women to buy the makeup, the clothes, or the diet product needed to make them beautiful. Men aren’t exempt from this either as males in TV or movies are generally portrayed at a level of fitness just not attainable to the average person without much sacrifice. In ads perfectly sculpted men are used to try to get other males to buy products like weight training equipment and muscle building chemicals. These tactics are not right to use in my opinion but for today that is not the point. The point is Cultivation Analysis works and this is a big example of it that people have only recently began to notice the problems of.