Those include the French newspaper LeMonde, which drew on my comments in the Washington Post, and the Turkish paper Sabah, which borrowed from my interview with USA Today. In Sweden, the Stockholm paper Svenska Dagbladet (or SvD) used some of the ideas in From Cronkite to Colbert in its efforts to understand the importance of Stewart and The Daily Show.

I also did an interview about The Daily Show with reporter Kathleen Gomes, who covers US politics for the Portuguese paper Publico.  Finally, I talked with reporter Charlie Gillis for his piece on Glenn Beck for the Canadian weekly newsmagazine Macleans.  I’m pleased with the quotes Gillis used from our conversation, but it would have been cool if he got my first name right!

Washington Post Reporter Paul Farhi and I talked at length for his (unfortunately titled) piece “Just who does Jon Stewart think he is?” A few days later, I did a live, hour-long chat with the Post.  Readers sent in a bunch of excellent questions – more than I had time to field.

Meanwhile, I talked with USA Today’s Gary Levin for his piece “Can Jon Stewart’s ‘Sanity’ rally actually shape political debate?” At the Christian Science Monitor, reporter Gloria Goodale quoted me in her Vox News blog posts “Will the Beck and Colbert-Stewart rallies rock-the vote?” and “Are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert going all serious on us?” Byron Tau at Politico found at least one thing I said useful for his (unfortunately negative) piece “Jon Stewart gets serious.” Funny enough, columnist Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post took great exception to my quote in his rebuttal to the Politico piece.

Finally, the morning of the rally I did a live interview with Warren Pierce on WJR radio, Detroit.  I also did a debriefing with Ben Rubin for his piece “Participants and pundits debate impact of Stewart’s’ ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’” in the Forward.

So a lot of excitement around the rally.  Now we can only hope the message of reasonableness in political discourse starts to get heard!

Companion to News and Journalism

My piece is titled Real News/Fake News: Beyond the News/Entertainment Divide.  The basic premise is that the kind of alternative, hybrid programming often mislabeled as “fake news” is really only fake to the extent that it violates the conventions that we assume define the “real” news.

Click here to read more about the Companion, which contains chapters from many of the world’s leading journalism scholars.

Stephen Colbert holding a copy of the fine book Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Age

Here’s Stephen Colbert holding a copy of the fine book Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Age, edited by my friends Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey Jones, and Ethan Thompson. As the editor from NYU Press who gave the book to Colbert wrote, Stephen “noticeably perked up” when he got to my chapter: “Stephen Colbert’s Parody of the Postmodern.”

From Cronkite to Colbert traces a historical trajectory that begins at the height of the network age and Walter Cronkite’s authoritative CBS Evening News, works its way through the breakdown of mainstream television news as a democratic resource, and ends in our current post-network moment, when the Fourth Estate is being reinvented in the most unlikeliest of places: late-night comedy.  More than just a study of broadcast journalism, however, the real target of the book is the sociocultural transformations that are dramatically reshaping patterns of public affairs media and democratic practice in an age of convergence culture, discursive integration and digital instability.  “Original and convincing,” suggests the journalism scholar Dan Hallin, “the result is a thought-provoking and important reflection on the transformation of television news and of American political discourse more generally.”

The book is available at university libraries across the country, as well as in the UK and Australia.  You can buy the book on Amazon, where it has been one of the sites top-100 books both on government and civics and on television history and criticism.  To visit Paradigm Publisher’s site, click here.