this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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Every guest on the daily show is there to promote something, it's a glorified extended ad spot. A skeptic raining on their parade does not help sell their books or other product, so that's never going to happen. The purpose is not to reveal truth, but sell shit.
It's a step left from Jerry Springer, and always has been. It's The Onion of talk shows.
If you need every implication of falsehood spelled out for you, then satire is not your thing, and that's okay, but it doesn't change the fact that the show started out on, and still airs on, Comedy Central. Its timeslot set it up to be watched before/after Saturday Night Live and so many others, and it started at a time when people were getting wise to the big conglomerates buying up all the news stations so they could control the narrative; Roughly the same time-period that gave us fark.com, Cracked.com, and TheOnion.com website literally went online the same year.
If you think The Daily Show expects to be taken seriously, and/or even pretends to be an entirely trustworth news source in the slightest, you've missed SO, SO MANY memos.
exactly, that’s why your suggestion above:
is not going to happen. it’s not a serious show.
You're missing the point. The less serious guests like this jackass discredit those more serious guests. Without him, people are more likely to get confused and start taking the show more seriously, like you apparently have.
Your personal obliviousness is not indicative of a trend among the general public. Pull your head out of your ass. We have to shift the overton window back to where bigotted idiots look like bigotted idiots, and you don't do that by platforming them exclusively alongside respectable people, academics, scientists, whatever.
Ideally, we wouldn't be platforming bigotted idiots at all, and people like you wouldn't confuse the show making fun of conspiracy theory whackjobs for a serious news source, but here we are.