Day: June 26, 2006

Is The Daily Show Poisoning Democracy?

Buck Banks

Spreading cynicism: On Friday, The Washington Post’s columnist Richard Morin wrote, “This is not funny: Jon Stewart and his hit Comedy Central cable show may be poisoning democracy.” Wow, that’s heavy, and it’s one of Editor-In-Chief Jon’s favorite shows — when he can stay up late enough to watch it.

Appears Morin was bloviating about a supposed study by a couple of political scientists from East Carolina University that allegedly found that “young people who watch Stewart’s faux news program, The Daily Show, develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.” Previous research among college students found that 48 percent of them watched The Daily Show and only 23 percent of them followed “hard news” programs closely.

Young people who watch Stewart’s faux news program, The Daily Show, develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.

Puh-leeze! And Stewart makes them not read newspapers by the droves, too, I suppose. The slack-ass voting habits of college students is a big story — every election year — and it hasn’t changed since I had hair down to my shoulders and was politically poisoned by Chevy Chase’s cynical impersonation of a clumsy President Gerald Ford on Saturday Night Live.

So these yahoo perfessors did a speriment:

To test for a “Daily Effect,” [Jody] Baumgartner and [Jonathan S.] Morris showed video clips of coverage of the 2004 presidential candidates to one group of college students and campaign coverage from “The CBS Evening News” to another group. Then they measured the students’ attitudes toward politics, President Bush and the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).

The results showed that the participants rated both candidates more negatively after watching Stewart’s program. Participants also expressed less trust in the electoral system and more cynical views of the news media, according to the researchers’ article, in the latest issue of American Politics Research.

“Ultimately, negative perceptions of candidates could have participation implications by keeping more youth from the polls,” they wrote.

Come on, maybe they just felt the choice sucked so much that voting seemed rather pointless. I know I did. How can anyone remain uncynical in this postmodern national political environment where partisanship and pandering are exceeded only by cronyism, fraud, influence for sale, malfeasance and the president rules absolutely?

Au contraire. I think Jon Stewart is performing a public service by showing the boobs and crooks who run this country for the bozos they are. Come on, college kids, let’s give Jon a big hip, hip, hooray! Hello? Kids? Are you out there?

DoD: We’re Just Making the Jihad Worse by Calling It a ‘Jihad’

Buck Banks

Name game: As if the Department of Defense didn’t have better things to do — like, say, creating an exit strategy for Iraq — they’ve had a couple of staffers looking at the language gubmint officials use to describe events and characters revolving around the war on terror, or “terr,” as POTUS pronounces it. They’ve come up with a handy miscellany of terms that will win the war of words even as we lose the battle for hearts and minds.

In dealing with Islamic extremists, the West may be giving them the advantage due to cultural ignorance, maintain Dr. Douglas E. Streusand and Army Lt. Col. Harry D. Tunnell IV. The men work at the National Defense University at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C.

The two believe the right words can help fight the global war on terror. “American leaders misuse language to such a degree that they unintentionally wind up promoting the ideology of the groups the United States is fighting,” the men wrote in an article titled “Choosing Words Carefully: Language to Help Fight Islamic Terrorism.”

Applying these terms to our enemies and their works condemns their current activities as divisive and harmful.

An example is jihadist. Most of us take jihadist or jihadi to mean an Islamic extremist who is fighting a holy war. But Steusand and Tunnell maintain that in Arabic jihad “literally means striving and generally occurs as part of the expression, Jihad fi sabil illah, striving in the path of God.” Which is considered a good thing for Muslims to do.

According to Islamic scholars, the correct term for Islamic extremists is hirabah, which identifies those engaged in sinful warfare that is contrary to Islamic law. Steusand and Tunnell offer some other examples of western semantic screw-ups:

Another word constantly misused in the West is mujahdeen. Again, in American dictionaries this word refers to a holy warrior � again a good thing. So calling an al Qaeda terrorist a mujahid legitimizes him. The correct term for these killers is mufsidun, Streusand and Tunnell say. This refers to an evil or corrupt person. “There is no moral ambiguity and the specific denotation of corruption carries enormous weight in most of the Islamic world,” they wrote.

People can apply other words instead. “Fitna/fattan: fitna literally means temptation or trial, but has come to refer to discord and strife among Muslims; a fattan is a tempter or subversive,” they wrote. “Applying these terms to our enemies and their works condemns their current activities as divisive and harmful.”

Finally, Steusand and Tunnell urge Westerners to translate Allah into God. They argue that using Allah to refer to God is like using Jehovah to refer to a Hebrew God. What’s wrong with that? Fact is, Muslims, Christians and Jews all worship the God of Abraham, but, say our intrepid translators, using different names serves to exaggerate divisions among the religions.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it, Messrs. Steusand and Tunnell. To say that after five years of verbally sparring with the hirabas, we’re going to change the rules of engagement by changing the terms and they’re just going to see that we “get it” and come crawling out of their caves to stop sewing fitna and quit being fattan and give up being mufsidun? Sounds about as effective as the rest of the DoD’s antiterrorism arsenal.