An Aside: News Comedy as a Type of Second-Tier News Media

This posting is supposed to be a podcast (by me) updating my faithful followers as to my discoveries about second-tier news media and their role in the dissemination of education policy.

It's not. Instead, I bring you an aside -- a look at another form of second-tier news media, news comedy.

A 2009 Rasumussen Reports survey indicated that "nearly one-third of Americans under the age of 40 say satirical news-oriented television programs like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart are taking the place of traditional news outlets."

Of course, satirizing the news -- especially political news, which is how most top-tier news outlets tend to define news -- is nothing, pardon the pun, new.

Jay Leno and David Letterman do so every weekday night on broadcast TV; Saturday Night Live has the weekend shift. Before them, there were Johnny Carson, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and That Was The Week That Was (TW3) hosted by none other than Sir David Frost.

Before TV, Will Rogers captivated radio audiences. The surviving copies of Weekly Lampoon[1] and Momus Ridens Or, Comical Remarks on the Publick Reports,[2] two British periodicals of the early 1690s, suggest that the alternative press probably has a history as old as the mainstream press. Today, The Onion is one of the better known of the satirical newspapers/news sites.

From ancient times, fools or jesters were appointed, with impunity, to criticize those in authority -- to say the things that needed to be said but that no one else dared to.

One problem I see with relying too heavily on comedy news sites is that they are really, really good at mocking politicos and at pointing out what's wrong. They seldom stray into the areas of what's right, nor do they tend to stick around long enough to try to figure out how to fix something. They make us laugh, but do they motivate us to act?

Uncle Jay is one of my favorite news satirists. In the video above, he discusses the word "euphemism."

What euphemisms are used in the world of education?

Podcast coming soon.

Stay tuned.

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[1]Weekly Lampoon (London, 1690).

[2]Momus Ridens: Or, Comical Remarks on the Publick Reports (London, 1690-1691). Also referred to as Momus Ridens: Comical Remarks on the Weekly Reports in some issues. Both Weekly Lampoon and Momus Ridens were “printed and are to be sold by Randal Taylor , near Stationers-Hall.”