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.

Framing in Today's News: Ethical or Not?

Today’s news stations always seem to have some side agenda to meet when reporting the news. It’s not always enough to just tell you what’s happening in the world, sometimes they have to try to give the viewer a subtle push in the right direction as to how they interpret the news we hear. This is called framing a story. Framing literally means, a structure or angle given to a news story that influences the readers understanding.  A good example of this could be the report titled, Order for millions of blank work permits, green cards raising amnesty concerns, posted on FOX news October 21st 2014. The link to the article and video report are below and I suggest watching it before continuing.

Order for millions of blank work permits, green cards raising amnesty concerns- FOX News

This report begins the framing process in the title with the use of the word amnesty. Amnesty means pardoning of someone who has caused a major political offense. This brings the idea to mind the image that the Hispanic migrants are a group of lawless thugs who could have already committed heinous crimes either in the states or out of them. It is true that entering the country illegally is considered against the law but this has been considered a minor misdemeanor for a long time up until recent years, and the way they are making it out to sound frames the migrants in the worst possible light from the very start.

The report itself also makes it sound like these migrants will be simply given a card and allowed to become citizens with no questions asked, when in reality there will be a long process to gaining citizenship and a green card. There will also be fees that must be paid, including any taxes the migrants who have been in the states for over a year have not yet paid. The report also omits the rules for keeping citizenship once granted to migrants, which will require migrants to keep a very clean police record if they are to keep their green card and citizenship status, otherwise if they break any laws they can lose this and be deported back to their country of origins. The omitting of all these important facts serves only to turn the audience against the migrants in this report.

Example of another news company known for framing its news every once in a while.

Finally they also include in the video itself a comment that is very important to notice. “So with millions of Americans still out of jobs, Obama’s plans will allow for employers to hire millions of foreigners…” They mention at the beginning that millions of Americans are out of work, right before saying how the plan will allow millions of migrants to be hired in the states. This is a gross slant saying that it is the fault of this plan and the migrants that these Americans are out of work and will stay out of work. There are no sources given to link the number of Americans out of work to this plan at all and again this is another act of framing to turn the viewer against the plan and the migrants.

In the end there were many more graceful ways this report could have been done. For one they could have actually gone into the details and restrictions about the plan and how these green cards would be given out and what would be needed to earn and then keep them. They also could have gone with a less aggressive title for the report itself. Whether you agree with the message this report portrays or not I feel that it should be understood that there is an ethical problem in the way it was structured. News should be as objective as possible so as to allow the viewer to make his own informed decision. This report, on the other hand, left out a lot of key information and added in opinions that had no place in an objective news report. Sadly this is only one example of the framing you can find on news sites right this second.

Print Media to the Future!

Print media has had an enormous impact on our intellectual culture ever since Johannes Gutenberg created the first mechanical printing press and published the first copy of the Gutenberg Bible in 1455. Ever since then print media has become an essential cultural tool that has allowed information to cleanly travel through the ages without having to rely on hazy and forgetful word of mouth. That being said, today even as digital formats become all the more common around the world, print media is still essential and very popular as each year more print media is released and helps shape people’s perceptions and experiences of the world around them. In this sense print media can define key aspects of the generation they appear in. If by some chance we were able to travel forward in time, say 150 years or so, and wanted to take a bit of the past with us to share with the future about our time, some printed media would be an excellent choice to do so. And that brings me to today’s topic, if I could go into the future like I have just said, and take only 3 objects of print media, what would they be and why?

                First object I would take is one well known in the first decade of the 2000’s, a copy of the Deathly Hollows, book 6 of the Harry Potter series. Now why would I take this book you might ask? It’s not because it was my favorite series or even my favorite book in the series. Harry Potter is a character everyone in my generation knows. Whether the read the books or not, you have heard about him and maybe even seen the movies. Anybody you ask will be able to give you even just the slightest bit of knowledge on who Harry Potter is and whether the series was good or not. The series may never become classic literature, or it might, either way no one can deny that it was a very big phenomenon of our generation and has shaped many people’s perceptions of good literature in our time.

                The next object of print media I’d take is book 1 of Naruto. I’m not a huge fan of Naruto, I prefer One Piece or FairyTail honestly, but I have kept up with the story over the years. The way I see it a lot of people in our generation have begun to enjoy many creations from outside countries as media becomes more easily accessible. The fact that Japanese Manga’s and Animes have done so well in the American market and are growing still is proof that we are becoming worldlier and that we are being affected and shaped by media from even outside our culture. Naruto is another character that not everyone may follow in his story but has become well known enough for most Americans below 30 or 40 to at least recognize his name. This alone I think makes it relevant enough to take and share with the future, and compare it to see how much outside media is enjoyed then compared to now.

                For my last piece of print media I’d Take the latest edition of the New York Times. Newspapers are print media too and are very important sources of worldly information as long as you don’t take everything at face value. They are good for at least realizing what is happening throughout our world recently and because of that, would be a treasure to take to the future. It would be like getting an almost firsthand view to the events of the past without the usual distortions information might receive over 150 years. I’m sure someone in the future would find what’s going on here today interesting as it would be a firsthand account, something they would never see in their accounts of the past. Unless they already had a copy of course.