Daily Show Respect

Those kids at The Daily Show were exhibiting signs of relentless attention deficit disorder in the hour before Hillary’s speech. They huddled with their producer/instigator outside the doors of the Camera Gallery where photographers get to set up their tripods and shoot the action from behind the podium unjostled. Like a pride of lions unable to decide on the night’s prey, Jason Jones, Samantha Bee and John Oliver largely ignored the rubbernecking delegates and “real” news reporters who would recognize them, stop for some chit-chat or a photo and move on.

Catie Beck from Channel 8 in Austin, Texas, was a chosen one and got the interview treatment from Bee, something to do with exposing her breasts and shaking them in the face of an interviewee. Beck says she wishes she could work for The Daily Show team, but when pressed about “why” she offered a response that was as thick with irony as it was filled with regrettable truth.

“You gotta love the fact that a comedy news team is more respected and better at journalism than their network counterparts,” Beck says. I initially wanted to let my incredulity leak onto my face and point out, with disdain, that she was trashing herself and her own journalistic talents with that comment—regardless of how truthful it was. And sadly, it is true that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is a much smarter, more sharply wrought take on the news than the obfuscatory drivel shoveled by the main networks.

“Sometimes the truth is so absurd that it is funny,” Beck went on. I’m sure she was talking so bluntly because she had never heard of this oddly named free mag, Yellow Scene, and knew her bosses would never see what she had said. But you gotta wonder about someone who aspires to be one of those network news people and slams them at the same time. Professional S and M at its best.

—James Burrus, Yellow Scene Magazine

More DNC coverage here.