The ongoing debate over the nature and impact of fake news

The debate over the newsworthiness, accuracy, reliability and influence of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report continues unabated. Here’s today’s entry from the Huffington Post (John McQuaid), responding to two pieces from the CBS News blog and Philly.com that we linked yesterday (internal links omitted, my emphasis added):

The Daily Show: Ruining America’s Youth?
John McQuaid

Ever since the Daily Show reached its current levels of viewership and planted its flag as a pop culture force and, strange as it may seem, an arbiter of American political culture, there’s been a silly, semi-annual debate about the precise Meaning of All This. It goes like this: “Since many twentysomethings watch the Daily Show, and many name it or other comedy shows as a primary news source, are we doomed as a nation?”

. . .

The first misreading is that the Daily Show (and its spinoff, the Colbert Report) are purely “comedy shows.” They are, indeed, comedy shows: their principal goal is to be funny. But that’s not a very good distillation of what they do; the phrase itself, especially in the context of a discussion of media and politics, sounds vaguely musty, like we’re talking about Sid Caesar. (Saturday Night Live is, indeed, more in the Caesar tradition.)

What the DS and CR are doing is skewering the various lies and hypocrisies, large and small, of our political and media establishments. It’s both silly and incisive. As such, these shows require some sophistication to “get.” (Colbert, in particular, has reached a trippy level of meta-supra-self-referentiality that requires an advanced degree in – philosophy? set theory? – to understand fully.) Do they impart a lot of hard information? No. But they do impart something else – a little analytical distance from all the bulls#!t we’re constantly bombarded with.

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Hee – “meta-supra-self-referentiality”? That’s beautiful. I think I’d like to see a multiple prefix word like that one when next they change the opening credits.