NP: Frank Zappa, Lather

I've been meaning to get to this for a week or so now. After Walter Cronkite passed away, there was an online poll from Time magazine that found Jon Stewart to be the nation's "most-trusted" newscaster. As you might suspect, there was much hand-wringing about the fact that a fake news show beat out the competition on this subject.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I found some of the analysis to be pretty underwhelming and off-base. In the Chicago Tribune, Steve Johnson quotes the editor of Time.com as saying "I think it says irony and sincerity are not mutually exclusive, that people communicate that way." And in a piece that studiously avoids mentioning Stewart and the Time.com poll, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post claims that "when we are drowning in information, those who deliver the bits and bites become less important," and goes on to quote Lee Siegel at The Daily Beast, who wrote that "Now the Olbermanns, O'Reillys, Stewarts et al. sign off after assuring us that nothing is as it seems. Their job is to puncture anyone who in the previous 24 hours told us, with any kind of authority, that this is the way it was. And we happily accept their performance of ironic, sarcastic anti-sincerity because we want to."

This, I think, misses the significance of the entirely dubious poll results. People don't gravitate to Stewart because he's ironic. They turn to him because they desperately need help cutting through the clutter of raw data of Twitter feeds, half-baked opinions and poorly-sourced up-to-the-minute headlines from 24-hour news networks, blogs and talk radio. What people need more than anything else is a bullshit detector. O'Reilly and Olbermann and their ilk on either side of the ideological spectrum have their bullshit detectors calibrated along partisan lines, while the big guns at the broadcast networks are generally too timid to call bullshit on anyone, lest they burn a bridge with a source, or even worse, an advertiser. So having someone who is, by the nature of his job, encouraged to mock the stupidity of either side can be massively appealing to those who just don't want to be either shouted at, talked down to, or lied to.

With the way things are going, finding trusted "filters" for the raw data of this information culture is going to become more and more important. It's why Nico Pitney was such a rock star during the election turmoil in Iran, while CNN looks foolish whenever they start reciting Twitter posts on the air. This notion that everyone is plugged into the data stream is both foolish and dangerous, and so it's becoming even more and more critical to have someone who can look at the raw feed and see The Matrix that can explain it clearly to the rest of us.

There was something yesterday or maybe the day before about how social filters may play this role instead of the media, and that seems like a catastrophically bad idea to me, because, as Bill Maher pointed out on his show last week, stupid people talking to other stupid people is how thinks like the birther movement happen.

I don't think we'll see another Walter Cronkite, necessarily, because the landscape has become too fragmented, but I think we may start to see a backlash against the blatantly partisan or non-confrontational presentation of news as the younger generation starts to assert itself in the media.

Trust me on this one.