People used to argue with their friends about the plot of a show or what the score had been in the ball game because, well, how were you going to check? Unless you had personally saved the newspaper or recorded it on your VCR, you would need to go to a literal archive and pull it up on microfilm. “It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.” You experienced it in real time and internalized what was important and what it felt like. It was this true fact that will sound insane to anyone under the age of thirty: People on television reasonably assumed that no one would hear what they had said ever again.Īs essayist Chuck Klosterman records in The Nineties: A Book, the key characteristic of twentieth-century media was its ephemerality. What had created a culture of “just talking on TV without any accountability,” as one Daily Show writer put it, was not only the sheer volume and speed of the news. The audience would titter in excited anticipation. It got so that when certain figures would show up in a segment, you knew you were about to witness them receive their just comeuppance, a great spectacle of spilled archival blood.
The media’s storytellers became the subjects of a theater of the absurd. Through all this, certain public figures would be transformed into storylines with narratives and characters, with inside jokes and recurring bits. And our righteous host would send these hacks packing. There was a clip, there was always a clip. And then the show would play a clip of the same talking head’s appearance on a C-SPAN 3 four-in-the-morning call-in show from ten years ago, back when he’d been paid to kiss another ring, saying the exact opposite thing.
#Ace of spades hq doctor who professional#
Stewart would set his target on some party shill or professional talking head being condescending, self-important, dishing out blame, kissing whatever ring he’d been paid to kiss. The feature that really made The Daily Show famous was its masterful use of archival video clips to reveal the hypocrisy of the chattering classes.
0 kommentar(er)
