I just caught up on the past two weeks of The Daily Show (and The Colbert Report), and I am blown away by the segments in which Jason Jones travels to India to cover their recent election. He talked to ordinary Indian citizens. He contrasted Western bigotries and attitudes toward an enormous and culturally varied nation with the realities he discovered on the ground. He highlighted the absurdities — which, to be fair, do exist, but they’re different from American political absurdities.
It was hilarious. It was informative. It offered the best American reporting on an event that will have global impact, and on you, even if you’re totally ignorant of everything outside the U.S. (It was better than anything I saw on British news, too.)
Shame on everyone else, and kudos to Comedy Central and The Daily Show and Jason Jones.
Oh, come on! The U.S. news reports on foreign matters and leaders all the time. I know way more about Toronto mayor Rob Ford because of the nightly news than I do about the cat that saved the boy from a dog attack, which was all over the Internet (ah, actually, it was all over the nightly news, too).
I wonder whether part of the problem is that the news media feel the need to package everything into a standard form, even when it doesn’t fit. Can we have a talking head saying A, and then cut to another one saying Not A? If not, we don’t know how to tell the story.