NERVOUS LAUGHTER

I don't normally watch TV news, except for those occasions (an explosion in my neighborhood, an attack on my country, a lot of rain) when I feel the need to know about something right now. Real information, put in context rather than faux urgent soundbites, is better gathered from newspapers and magazines. If I can't get it right now, so what? There are very few things I want to know about right now. Most news nuggets I don't want to know about ever.

But I have seen enough TV news to find The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, with its deadpan satire of all those familiar media clichés (self-importantly sympathetic correspondents; tear-eyed celebrities in ersatz unguarded moments), lethally funny. Besides being the most reliably on-target parody on TV, though, the Comedy Central show has evolved into a bizarro news program in its own right.

Some media critics fret about how so much of the youth demographic now gets its news with a twist, from the Daily Show and other late-night programs hosted by former standup comics, rather than straight, from serious talking heads like Dan Rather. But those in the business point out that this is the new reality.

"If you're an 18-year-old kid, who are you going to trust to give you the facts?" Eddie Feldmann, executive producer of CNBC's Dennis Miller, asked rhetorically recently. "Dan Rather in that epaulet jacket where he's just about to go fly-fishing after the show, or Jon Stewart? Of course you're going to listen to Jon."

As it happens, Rather himself may be O.K. with that. "If we cover something on the Evening News," Rather said at a CBS press conference about election year coverage, "then Jon Stewart may very well deal with it on his show or Letterman on his. So it feeds on one another." And as Fox News Channel's Brit Hume pointed out, "In the course of setting up jokes, [late night hosts] are at least getting in a bit of news."

In any case, not only is the Daily Show a pretty good source of actual news, it's also a potent antidote to standard televised smarm. Even Connie Chung seemed to recognize Jon Stewart as a legitimate fellow news announcer when she asked him a couple of years ago, apparently seriously, if he'd been asked to replace Dan Rather or Peter Jennings.

"She's very nice, but for God's sake, she married Maury Povich. What does that tell you?" Stewart said at a news conference. "Listen, that night she was bouncing between ... literally, the stories I think were arson, pedophilia, me, and world soccer. I hate to say that she was actually serious. I honestly think she was still thinking about the arson thing."

Much of Stewart's charm comes from this constant, self-deprecatory shrug. "Thanks for meeting the fake press," he said the other week to Meet the Press's Tim Russert, who'd stopped by to hawk his new book. And yet, especially in its election year coverage, Stewart and his team can reveal something about politics that serious news shows miss.

"All we want is one human moment," Stewart said, regarding Daily Show interviews in which he or his correspondents ask politicians rudely blunt or seemingly idiotic questions. Before the Democratic candidates had winnowed down just to John Kerry, for instance, Stewart remarked to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle that it must be a grind having nine hopefuls in the race.

"He said, 'No, it's an exciting time,'" Stewart recalled. "And I said, 'Really? Because it seems like it's crushing you.' And at that moment he just kind of stopped, and he started to giggle. That's the moment you look for, where they're showing their humanity - if it still exists. Which in many cases, you know, it does not."

It's a tribute to the show's sharpness that its fans are not just fellow Democrats, even though Stewart's Bush-bashing has increased markedly in the past few months. The other side gets its share of hits too, often in the same bit: "Please explain to me how John Kerry sounds more dickish telling the truth than Bush does when he's lying?" Stewart asked on-camera recently.

The Daily Show often aims arrows at the media itself rather than the subjects of media coverage. "I think it's relatively atrocious," Stewart said of today's 24-hour cable news cycle. "Not that we shouldn't know when someone's been kidnapped. I think we should. We just don't have to wait until they come back for them to go talk about another story." He faked exasperation (or maybe he wasn't faking) when asked why so much news programming seems to be filled with what is only by the most generous definition of the word news.

"Sir, we don't have their offices bugged!" Stewart responded. "I don't know why they're doing it. They have to fill time. They have 24 hours, and there's only so many times you can page Dr. Gupta. Do you watch CNN? Every now and again, like when SARS comes out, they're 'Paging Dr. Gupta.' And then he walks in, it's like, 'We're all gonna die!' and then he walks away again."

Especially during an election year, the line between news and news satire becomes blurred. How different are many political ads, really, from Daily Show correspondent Steven Colbert's fake one - which listed Colbert as "running for government office (TBD - to be determined)" and had Colbert announcing, "I believe that elementary schools should be for our children! But my opponent" - flash to a quick headshot of Hitler - "is against all that." Then the music rose inspirationally as the camera returned to Colbert, just the way it always does on The West Wing when President Martin Sheen is debating some Republican adversary.

Stewart is master of the deadpan retort, which is of course far more effective than simply railing against the often idiotic habits of the media. A stellar moment was when he ran a clip of The New York Times's Elizabeth Bumiller pressing Kerry on whether he considered himself a liberal or not.

"Please, answer the question!" Stewart interrupted at his desk, voicing Bumiller's supposed thoughts. "I don't want to have to think of a better one."

Bumiller, in clip, to Kerry: "Is God on our side?"

Stewart, in studio, to audience: "Top of your head: 'Why are we here?' Out of your ass: 'Meaning of life?'"

I wonder sometimes how all this plays around the world, now that CNN has been airing a weekly version of the Daily Show for the past 18 months, with an emphasis on celebrity interviews and international topics, since so much of the show's essence is its parody of American peculiarities. (Although I'd say that any international tourist who's looked around at Disneyland can appreciate segments like "Fatten Up for Fall," with its urgent warning that "Twenty percent of Americans are still not overweight.")

For his part, Stewart isn't exactly awed by CNN and its global audience. "Basically, my feeling is this: If you can make it in Bahrain, you can make it United Arab Emirates," he said. "We're just excited to have the opportunity to let down the entire world. I feel badly for the countries that think we're serious," Stewart continued, "but I have heard that in sub-Saharan Africa, irony is a real art form.

"Listen, this is not the first time we've been broadcast internationally," he noted, pointing out that the Daily Show (which premiered in 1996 with Craig Kilborn, although Stewart didn't take over till three years later) has been seen in Canada since the fall of 1999. "And may I say, without incident," Stewart added. "As a matter of fact, I believe that our show has helped promote a healing between the two countries."

***

Our Times: Los Angeles Times editor-in-chief John Carroll has again slammed critics of the paper's California recall coverage - coverage that even many liberals considered remarkably biased against Arnold Schwarzenegger - this time in a May 16 op-ed adapted from a University of Oregon speech on newspaper ethics he gave two weeks ago.

But this isn't the first time Carroll's attacked his attackers. A few days after Schwarzenegger's election in October, he wrote a much-discussed op-ed that not only refused to name the paper's critics but also, as talk radio host Hugh Hewitt noted at the time, repeatedly dismissed their complaints with terms like "pornography" and "rant." As Hewitt pointed out then, this is "a tactic the legal system brands simply as 'non-responsive.' If he was confident that the reader would agree, he ought to have named names and used quotes."

Carroll does name names this time, with one notable exception - the syndicated California political columnist (and former Times staff reporter) Jill Stewart. Obviously, she still sticks in his craw but, unlike his other nemesis Bill O'Reilly, isn't big enough for the Times chief to bother coughing up her identity for readers. Instead he chews over it secretively, like a dog hoarding a bone still being picked.

Carroll slams Fox News and (unnamed) websites as "pseudo-journalists" that have "taken on the trappings of journalism" but are really fakers, because they don't seek to "earnestly serve the public." Evidently, Carroll considers opinion journalists who publicly argue their opinions to be, ipso facto, not serving the public. (At least, not earnestly.)

He does grudgingly acknowledge that in this country journalism is open to all: "It is the constitutional right of every citizen, no matter how ignorant or how depraved, to be a journalist." And we're depraved, Carroll apparently thinks, on account of we're deprived ... of the five Pulitzers the Times just won, for one thing, but also of the awareness that the reader (or listener, or viewer) is "a master to be served."

Gee, Officer Krupke, tell us more. Like how, for instance, the Times reader is served by mysterious, information-withholding descriptions such as this: "The worst of the fictions originated with a freelance columnist in Los Angeles who claimed to have the inside story on unethical behavior at the Times." Or this: "Instead of being ignored, the author of the column was booked for repeated appearances on O'Reilly, on MSNBC, and even on the generally trustworthy CNN."

Well, who is she - this damned, infernal freelance columnist who managed to hoodwink even the generally trustworthy CNN? For the record, Jill Stewart is a friend of mine (we pseudo-journalists believe in owning up to biases, even if real ones don't always). And although it's convenient for the Times to dismiss her merely as a freelancer, her weekly column does appear in (real? pseudo?) papers like the San Francisco Chronicle, the Orange County Register, the L.A. Daily News, and such CityBeat sister papers as the Pasadena Weekly.

So does the Times have an agenda? I'd say yes, but it's unconscious rather than Machiavellian. In Carroll's Sunday op-ed piece, he again defended the paper's decision to run stories about Arnold Schwarzenegger's groping history just a few days before the election (giving his campaign little time to respond), and remains angry at accusations that these stories were held for two weeks.

Carroll says the stories weren't ready yet. "In journalism," Jill Stewart responded in her post-recall column, "a story is done when the boss says turn it in." She might have added that also in journalism, a favorite technique for handling critics is to dismiss them as not really journalists. But that doesn't mean such a dismissal is accurate.