The April Fool - UNESCO’s Comedy Central Caper

Jon Stewart's point of view is as phony as his name.

"The Daily Show’s UNESCO “epic” was a complete joke. It was UNESCO propaganda, masquerading as satire, masquerading as reporting."

Unfortunately, this type of "reporting," where the press and media merely repeat the press releases and 'talking points from government agencies and NGO's, is all too common!

The Rosett Report » UNESCO’s Comedy Central Caper
By Claudia Rosett On April 1, 2012

April Fool’s Day seems a fitting frame for this tale, in which TV’s Comedy Central lampooned the U.S. last month for defunding UNESCO — the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — after UNESCO’s nose-thumbing decision last fall to grant membership to the Palestinian Authority. Promising an “epic” expose, The Daily Show’s host, Jon Stewart, dispatched comedian John Oliver to produce a story about the big bad U.S. versus good little UNESCO. Oliver dug all the way to an interview with a UNESCO flack (or maybe the UNESCO flack dug all the way to John Oliver), who mentioned that when the U.S. pulled its funding of more than $78 million per year from UNESCO, the impoverished West African country of Gabon stepped up to pledge $2 million in solidarity with UNESCO. So, the doughty Oliver flew to Gabon, to deliver a report from the field on the generosity of the Gabonese government, and the presumed horrors that will now afflict the world if America continues to deprive Paris-based UNESCO of great stacks of U.S. tax dollars.

As comedy, it was all very entertaining: satire wrapped around the come-hither implication that beneath the laugh lies a poignant and serious piece of reportage. Noting the praise showered upon The Daily Show’s UNESCO report by an array of “journalistic outlets,” a writer for the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf ^[1], extolled the special powers of comedy writers “who take the time to understand the inside baseball” and “in the search for absurdity” see with eagle eyes the “real world consequences.”

Except, as a piece of reporting, The Daily Show’s UNESCO “epic” was a complete joke. It was UNESCO propaganda, masquerading as satire, masquerading as reporting. It had everything to do with slick repackaging of UNESCO’s own self-serving “talking points,” and almost nothing to do with the real world. This was fantasy UNESCO, and, for that matter, fantasy Gabon, all dolled up for the Comedy Central set — please check your dictators, terrorists, and spendthrift feather-bedding international bureaucrats at the door.

-more at link-