INKS| Comedy with news
News is all around us, but for college students, the news may not always be "fun," so many college students have turned to news parodies, such as "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show."
On the one hand, college students becoming informed is good, but are they sacrificing accuracy for the sake of comedy?
Take the statements made by American Civil Liberties Union director Anthony Romero on "The Colbert Report" earlier this year. Romero said President George W. Bush was the "very worst president for civil liberties."
There is no debate that Bush overstepped constitutional bounds and violated civil liberties; however, I think that even our most liberal professors would agree that there are several presidents who have committed worse atrocities against civil liberties.
Abraham Lincoln had more than 18,000 rebel leaders arrested and held in prison without trial. Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act of 1917, under which he shut down dozens of newspapers. Franklin Roosevelt had approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent held in internment camps.
During the 2008 elections, thousands of college students watched news parodies to get their news, but with inaccuracies such as the one made by Romero, are news parodies doing more harm than good?
I decided to see for myself how much news parodies influenced people, so I set up a simple Internet poll asking one question: "Who said, 'I can see Russia from my house,' during the 2008 election cycle?" While I only received a few dozen results, those results were shocking: Only 41 percent got the right answer, Tina Fey, while 46 percent said Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
Those results were honestly scary. Those results showed me one thing: People are relying too much on news parodies. When people confuse a Saturday Night Live skit with actuality, that is frightening.
Well, at least we have the major news networks to rely on, right? Until last week, I was honestly willing to say that the major news networks provided a decent portrayal of current events. While I think all networks have some bias to them, no network was biased to an extreme point.
Then I saw CNN and MSNBC's coverage of the Tea Party tax protests. Their coverage was not only biased; it was downright inappropriate and unprofessional.
After getting into an argument with a protestor, one of CNN's reporters decided to send coverage back to the CNN anchor, saying that the protests were "anti-CNN." And she made the statement, "I think this is not really family viewing."
Well, I am glad that CNN stands up for family viewing. But where does "family viewing" fit into Anderson Cooper's statement later that night, "It's hard to talk while you're
