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"Daily Show" Invades New York Times
11-Jun-2009
Written by: Brian Donnelly
Jason Jones calls newspapers "aged news."
“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” correspondent, or fake correspondent since the show is a fake news show, Jason Jones took a tour of the New York Times headquarters for a segment on Wednesday’s show. Jones and his “Daily Show” crew sat down for an interview with New York Times Managing Editor Bill Keller, who was given the task of defending the value of newspapers in the age of instant communication to a cable television man.
Jones: Tell me about your love for this creaky old rag?
Keller: It's always been one of the higher aspirations in the business to work for the New York Times. These days, we're a little bit like the last ship afloat; we have all these lifeboats floating around underneath us, and people are dying to clamber on board?
Jones: But your lifeboats are made of paper, right?
As Jones walked through the newsroom with Communication Coordinator Kristin Mason, he picked up the landline phone of one staffer asking, “What’s this? A landline phone. Look at me. I'm a reporter from the '80s, making sure everything's factual,'" Jones said with the phone to his ear. "You guys are like walking Colonial Williamsburg."
“The Daily Show” always manages to get to the heart of an issue. Of course, their preferred way of getting there is to mock you. And so they did, telling an old joke with a new twist. Jones asked Keller what’s black, white and red all over? It wasn’t a newspaper, according to Jones, but the Times' balance sheets, which got a good laugh out of Keller, partly because it’s true. Jones noted in the piece that 40 percent of the Times' ad revenue has been lost to Craigslist and the Times has lost $75 million this quarter.
Before Jones left, however, the Times wanted to return the favor, interviewing him for their Arts Beat. While they didn’t have the luxury of seeing the finished segment, they stuck to the basic argument; the Times’ “aged news” versus the Internet’s “real news” as Jones had labeled them. While most of his responses described the differences between newspapers and bloggers, the biggest being the use of pants, Jones talked about the importance of newspapers like the Times, without which, “the news would not exist.” However, he quickly followed up by saying when they mess up, the “Daily Show” will be there to poke fun.
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