If Marshall McLuhan was right that "the medium is the message," in the case of wildly popular fake news, the message must be: Laugh your head off or you'll just end up crying your eyes out. But what if a few angry and motivating tears are what we need? What if all this laughing is pacifying us - making us inert? I hate to say it - I love my Amy Poehler fix as much as the next gal - but I fear therapeutic irony is rendering us politically impotent.
I think I understand what she's trying to say, if a bit inexpertly. While I do wonder at times what it will take to finally push the American people over the edge, I simply cannot place blame on TDS for their complacency. If anything, TDS has done a better job of connecting dots than the traditional media has, giving me all that much more outrage and spurring me on to more acts of protest, more letters to the editor, more contact with my elected officials. I'd like to think I'm not alone in that with my fellow TDS viewers. There is a lot of escapist fare out there, tons of options to distract you from the outrages of what's going on, but The Daily Show? Nope, I don't think so.
Joe Scarborough brings on HuffPo's Rachel Sklar and Center for Media and Public Affairs' Matthew Felling to discuss the inuring effects of The Daily Show
Thanks to TheAmericanMaxim for providing the video
