Self-promotion post: Episode two of “3A” is up. For those who don’t know, it’s a project my roommate and I work on when we’re putting off doing other things.

Which one do you think makes the case for Petraeus as a presidential candidate: Jon Swift or Mother Jones?

Technorati tags: [ petraeus | surge | iraq ]

Even in video, the Onion has preserved its format. You can just see this video’s script appearing in print as it’s narrated.

‘Students First In Line’ Program To Offer Job Training At Needy Schools
It really underscores the difference between the Onion video and the Daily Show: actors. Fake news. Not… stand-up comedy in a television news format. I doubt the Onion will be able to translate some of its bread-and-butter stories like “Heartbroken Bush Runs After Departing Rove’s Car,” which makes its ventures into video all the more interesting — will the fake news be popular enough or do viewers want the added stimulation of reality?

(See below for “reality” over-stimulation.)

Technorati tags: [ onion | daily show | satire | video | web 2.0 ]

Infotainment is awfully tempting. Especially when it comes to presidential campaigns. Do you ever wonder about the little things that get picked up? The talk about haircuts rather than budget cuts? (Again, we’re not exactly talking about comedy and news here, but the dangerous merging of entertainment and news. So maybe I’m going to change the way I’m framing my own analysis here to reflect that.)

While what they describe is not exactly infotainment, it’s close (it’s shameless archetyping): Vanity Fair has a great piece on what journalism on the Gore 2000 campaign looked like.

The writer, Evgenia Peretz, says that some of the national politics beat reporters fell too easily into the trap of making the race about caricatures while also judging on expectations, not results (i.e. Bush had low expectations and met them while Gore had high expectations and by the way did you hear about Gore and the Internet?). Read the rest of this entry »