Jake Silva - Media Studies Senior Project- Podcast Script

This podcast explores the history and scholarship of The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight by investigating contradictory research and writing in academia, as well as how the commercial, production practices of both programs shape their content. Political parody TV is a response to contemporary civic changes, as demonstrated by the genre’s reflexivity, reinvention, and absorption–or lack thereof–into mainstream news. Questions of The Daily Show (TDS) and Last Week Tonight (LWT)’s effect on viewers and politics are raised, but findings are equally concerned with how and why these alternative news programs became “respected”, and how their respective hosts build distinct rhetoric, as well as relationships with audiences. Many of Stewart and Oliver’s discursive techniques are adopted by news sources across the political and professional spectrum. Questions are also raised about advocacy within coverage, how “fake news” programs differ from mainstream news in content and form to better elucidate viewers, and how hosts of programs grapple with their dual role as real and satirical newsmen and public figures.