John Stewart Punks Nancy Grace

I'll admit it. When we first had cable in Singapore (SCV), and I was introduced to the "Talking Heads" pundits on TV from the Taiwanese Media (think people like 李敖、陈文茜、李涛 etc), I used to think that they are cool and soaked in everything that they said. Okay, in my defense, I was fresh into university and haven't had my Psychology 101 and 102 on statistics and research method, and not to mention the fact that I haven't had my Critical Thinking 101 (no, this is not a course offered by the university, but I somehow stumbled on an old textbook on logical thinking and fallacy, and the rest was history). Furthermore, I had no freaking idea how the media worked.

Now a few years wiser and more knowledgable, I now hold the greatest contempt for media personnel, especially now undergoing graduate school and minoring in statistics, I am much sharper in picking out fallacies in arguments and flaws in statistics and figures presented by the media to support/disavow certain arguments. Furthermore, I now understand the corrosive nature of the media (not all, but >90%) in shaping public opinion and discourse. This is why I somewhat agree with the Singapore government somewhat that the media should be regulated and is not all for "freedom of press". However, I must qualify myself by saying that what I think should be regulated is probably very different from what the Singapore government thinks. For example, I would allow Singlish and curse words to be on air, and would more than welcome any criticims to the government (trust me, there are many, if you have read this site). However, I would not allow any one of those patriotic kitschy shit on national pride on air (you know, the type that you see whenever National Day approaches).

The comedy clip below illustrates the point I make about the corrosive nature of the media quite well. The background story to this clip was that a few students from Duke University were accused of rape, and the media adopted the "guilty until proven innocent" rather than the "innocent until proven guilty" stance in covering this story. Jon Stewart has a fine time lampooning the worst of them all, Nancy Grace, for her despicable behavior.