While The Daily Show thrives on highlighting absurdity, the American press is largely incapable of calling it out. To recognize and treat something as absurd is to render a judgment, to depart from what Jay Rosen calls "The View from Nowhere," and that traditionalists call "objective journalism." This CBS News story published when the defunding took place is professionally executed and representative of typical coverage. "The Obama administration on Monday cut off funding for the U.N. cultural agency, after its member countries defied an American warning and approved a Palestinian bid for full membership in the body," it begins. "The lopsided vote to admit Palestine as a member of UNESCO, which only the United States and 13 other countries opposed, triggered a long-standing congressional ban on U.S. funding to U.N. bodies that recognize Palestine as a state before an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is reached."

There isn't anything wrong with that excerpt, or with the balance of the story, which runs through the politics at play in international organizations. "The UNESCO vote was a fallback for the Palestinian leadership that presented its plan for U.N. recognition as a state and full membership in the global body in September," CBS reports later in its piece, adding context about the larger issues at stake. "Israel has fiercely opposed the bid, and it has no chance of passing because the Obama administration has promised to veto any resolution in the Security Council."

But wait. The decision to treat UN membership for Palestine as the most relevant "larger issue" is itself a subjective judgment - one that the vast majority of news organizations made in their coverage. For The Daily Show, that judgment, advanced by the U.S. government and unconsciously accepted by news organizations, is itself absurd. They think the context, the bigger issue at stake, is the fate of the impoverished all over the world; the viability of the tsunami warning system; America's moral standing and international interests broadly rather than narrowly construed.



Journalists who cover government entities are habituated to see the world like the people they cover. They buy into entrenched institutions, their methods, and (problematically) their madness. For a Congressional reporter or a U.N. correspondent, international organizations and geopolitics routinely involves governments jockeying for advantage in ways that make a kind of sense if you obsessively follow the inside baseball and divorce it from real world consequences.



Whereas comedy writers at The Daily Show, who take the time to understand the inside baseball, nevertheless see things differently, for in the search for absurdity required of them, they're attuned to real world consequences, and uninclined to give establishment processes the benefits of any doubt. Transport a Politico reporter back to just before WWI and they'd cover the European system of alliances as insider realists, explaining to readers why each relationship made perfect sense. A Daily Show writer brought back to the same era would take a long look at geopolitics, study the insider dealings, and then irreverently ask, "So if these two little countries have a skirmish over an assassination you've all committed yourselves to a continent wide war? One that most of you would like to avoid and that has little prospect of making any of you better off? You're okay sending millions to their death if, say, a duke gets assassinated?"