Jon Stewart's trustworthiness no surprise
In the wake of Walter Cronkite’s death, time.com asked readers to vote for today’s most trusted newscaster. The decisive winner, with 44 percent of the vote, was Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s pull-no-punches “The Daily Show.” This was well ahead of the 29 per cent for NBC anchor Brian Williams, 19 per cent for ABC’s Charles Gibson and 7 per cent for CBS’s Katie Couric. (See map for state-by-state results.)
In my mind, the results are completely predictable. Personally I trust Jon Stewart more than anyone else to probe issues of actual importance. Most network news is sensationalist, and typically irrelevant blather, one step up from man bites dog. There are real problems in the world today. Young people know this. Increasingly they don’t accept the existing paradigms of what constitutes public discourse.
Jon Stewart’s popularity does not mean that today’s Net Generation is indifferent to the news. After all, to get most of Jon Stewart’s jokes, you actually have to know what is happening in the world.
Today’s youth are media-savvy, and have a good grip on what I would call the theater of Washington. A favorite Stewart technique was to note when a politician was blatantly contradicting what he or she said in the past. He would show two or three video clips back-to-back, and often just leave the contradiction to speak for itself. The news department of the big networks could do the same thing, but they choose not to. That’s not how they play the game. One can’t blame Stewart’s audience having greater faith that they’re getting the real goods.
May 16th, 2012 on
Our society is collectively creating, storing and communicating information at nearly exponential rates of growth. Most of this data is personally identifiable, and third parties control much of it. This personal data will be archived online forever and be instantly searchable, and few appreciate how many ways this data might be used to harm us.
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May 11th, 2012 on Reuters
A growing number of people argue that the notion of having a private life in which we carefully restrict what information we share with others may not be a good idea. Instead, sharing our intimate, personal information with others would benefit us individually and as a society.
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May 4th, 2012 on Reuters
Whatever happened to the “we”? We haven’t heard about it since the 2008 victory. “They built the largest online community in the history of the presidency,” says Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Media, which tracks the intersection of technology and politics. “But then they stopped talking to them and engaging them”.
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May 2nd, 2012 on The Globe and Mail
Recently, the smartest organizations have been rethinking what it means to be open. In this article I will show that there are three particular dimensions of openness that really matter in the business arena.
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March 26th, 2012 on The Huffington Post
The ‘Kony 2012′ director who was found naked in the street will remain in the hospital for several weeks. Danica Russell, Jason Russell’s wife, attributed her husband’s “reactive phsychosis” to the “sudden transition from relative anonymity to worldwide attention — both raves and ridicules, in a matter of days.”
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January 31st, 2012 on Social Media Week
The debate on the role of social media and change is over. Over the last year, many have questioned just how important social media are in helping activists achieve social change.
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