The Secret Weapon of The Daily Show

A producer of this popular US fake news show reads seven newspapers a day in print and doesn’t use Google to turn up inconsistencies, preferring stories on newspapers’ archive site LexisNexis.

Women’s Wear Daily publishes a feature story about Adam Chodikoff who stands behind Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and calls him a producer with “an old-fashioned passion for the old-fashioned media.”

Comedy Central’s Daily Show is a phenomenon. As the New York Times observed some time ago, ”at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it’s been The Daily Show that has tenaciously tracked big, ‘super depressing’ issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.”

Here are some secrets from Chodikoff’s toolbox, as described by WWD journalist Irin Carmon:

“Chodikoff reads seven newspapers a day in print, sits through hours of hearings on C-Span on a Saturday and watches Sen. John McCain grilling on Rachael Ray’s talk show. But consuming everything is only half the task. The competitive advantage he gives Stewart is having some historical memory in an amnesiac news cycle inherently more invested in the next angle than in context…

Chodikoff doesn’t use Google to turn up inconsistencies, preferring news stories on LexisNexis, and he ignores Wikipedia. Explaining why he prefers print over the Web, he cites a scene from the movie ‘Back to School,’ when Rodney Dangerfield asks his son why he’s buying used books. “And he says, ‘Because they’re already underlined, see?’ And Rodney says, ‘But that guy could have been a maniac.’ And that’s the problem with the Internet.”

When a [host Jon] Stewart rant fortified by his research generates millions of Web hits, as did the contrast between right-wing pundits’ takes on Bristol Palin and Jamie Lynn Spears’ teenage pregnancies, Chodikoff is only vaguely aware. ‘I’m out of the whole hipster, viral thing,’ he says…

He’s particularly proud of the moments when his research has pointed out substantive stories the major network newscasts mostly ignored, such as the second phase of the Senate Intelligence report in June, which concluded that the Bush administration lied in making the case for the Iraq war. Stewart skewered the Big Three for using their airtime for froth instead. ‘When they set themselves up for a target,’ Chodikoff said, ‘I love going in and getting them.’ “

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