The Daily Show and Political Activism

But Courtney Martin's January 7 Baltimore Sun column touches on the plaguing question of satire's role in politics: "Satire, of course, has a long and proven history as the source of bona fide social change. Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, George Orwell's Animal Farm - all of these led to new public awareness that then led to protest, even some pragmatic reforms. Rebels distributed copies of Animal Farm, a novella satirizing totalitarianism, to displaced Soviets in Ukraine right after World War II."

However, she laments, TDS viewers are only chatting around the water cooler.

Such claims are not only too simple, but wrong: the court jesters of our dark times translate into far more than chit-chat.

First, the quality political satire of comedians and parodists such as Stewart and Colbert give airtime-and often longer segments of airtime-to topics largely unmentioned by any other media. On February 12, for example, Colbert devoted The Word to a story buried or unreported by almost all other news: the latest Defense Department report that evidences Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith's "pre-war report fabricating a link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda Putting AlQaeda in Iraq may have taken some imagination back then, but thanks to inappropriateness [Feith] made it a reality." Colbert provided three-plus minutes of time to a crucial story of precisely how and who manipulated intelligence. Trust me: go google this report, and you find the briefest of coverage, beginning with a confusing and mealy-mouthed AP version, with most stories headlining Feith's self-defense rather than the critical report.

Second, because of the fair-use shield of parody, these court jesters can report on politician's lies and corruption, as well as launch major critiques of media and press failures to hold politician's accountable.

Third, as my research shows, significant counterpublics have formed through web-based communities around such political material as TDS which do translate into action.

Across our forty interviews with bloggers and online video producers as part of my research project "Rethinking Media and Democracy" funded by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council, we have discovered that web-based communities sparked by political commentary like The Daily Show are vibrant and translating into action. This past week, I interviewed an established blogger who began streaming TDS clips when his Macintosh wouldn't interface with the Comedy Central site, and decided it would be a service to other Mac users to post clips in Quicktime format. As a result, he unexpectedly began to get voluminous traffic from readers around the globe. I asked him if he thought that his site resulted in any action. It was a surprise to me to hear him report that in fact, as he learns from the ongoing conversations and comments posted on his website, that because of viewing and discussing The Daily Show many member of this progressive community have been led to activism. Another blogger was inspired to go join Cindy Sheehan's protest in Crawford because of the conversations engaged through his Daily Show postings.

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