The Daily Show Is Fake

Howard Dean really is a moron. He just is. He knows next to nothing about what he's talking about.

He was on The Daily Show tonight and he was saying more stupid things, basically just bashing Republicans, because that is all he knows how to do. Oh, and he said he would balance the budget and give health care to everyone, which would cripple our economy by requiring huge tax increases.

But the dumbest thing of all -- a mean feat -- that he said was that The Daily Show is "probably a lot more reliable to get [news] than the Washington Times and Fox News." And he meant it seriously. He said so twice: "I'm serious. ... I'm not saying this just to suck up."

I can criticize the Washington Times and Fox News with the best of 'em, and I often do. But they are accurate and fair more often than not (although when not, it can be egregious), as opposed to The Daily Show, which is not only almost never accurate, nor fair, it actually tries to not be these things.

And yesterday, Bill Moyers basically said the same thing, and appeared to mean it seriously. Dean can't drop in my esteem very much, but that comment dropped Moyers down a notch or two (as did some of his comments about the CPB and the "radical right," which spinelessly caved to public pressure and didn't cut the CPB funding like it is Constitutionally obligated to).

Anyway, the point is: TDS is fake. It is not real. The "news" they give you is not fair, complete, or accurate, and it doesn't even pretend or try to be those things. They use items from the news to make jokes, and they usually skew the facts to make a better laugh, as I've mentioned once or twice before.

An example from tonight -- there's usually one every night -- is where Jon implied that the the Flag Burning Amendment would invalidate the Flag Code's provision *for* burning a flag to dispose of it. (The laughter of the audience told us they probably didn't know this was in the Flag Code, despite my apparently false impression that this was common knowledge.)

But no proposed law against flag burning would restrict respectful burning of the flag in accordance with the Flag Code. Such proposals are always about desecration of the flag.

Of course, there are many reasons to be against the Flag Burning Amendment, and the specifics of it are really beyond the scope of my point here, which is simply that you're not going to be positively informed by The Daily Show. Maybe you didn't know the Amendment was passed in the House, and maybe you didn't know the Flag Code allows the flag to be burned, but now you also think that there's a conflict between the two.

That's not a net gain, from a purely news or information standpoint. If your goal is just to find new stuff to be cynical about, then yes, TDS is a great place to get your information. But if you want to be truly informed, it's terrible, and this is by design.