Over the last decades of the 20th century, and into the 21st, humor on late-night TV became a more influential part of the United States’ political conversations. Not only did viewers talk about what the shows were saying, but serious journalists in newspapers and television news did as well. This book explores how Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert became popular pundits, with their commentaries often being shown on the news or quoted in the papers, and how Tina Fey’s parody of Sarah Palin eclipsed the real life candidate herself. This transformation occurred after the attacks on 9/11 and the beginning of the War in Iraq, when comedy figures were often more critical and informative than traditional news sources. At the same time, they became more substantive in their critiques than political humor often had been in the past, which relied heavily on mocking political candidates’ personality quirks. Using transcripts from Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report during the presidential elections from 1980-2008, this book takes a comprehensive look at how the comedy itself transformed. In addition, the analysis includes how journalists in the Washington Post and the New York Times discussed the shows at the time, revealing how they once denigrated the programs, but came to regard them as valuable narrative resources.

In this fresh, literate, and biting critique of current thinking on some of today's most important and controversial topics, leading anthropologists take on some of America's top pundits. This absorbing collection of essays subjects such popular commentators as Thomas Friedman, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, and Dinesh D'Souza to cold, hard scrutiny and finds that their writing is often misleadingly simplistic, culturally ill-informed, and politically dangerous. Mixing critical reflection with insights from their own fieldwork, twelve distinguished anthropologists respond by offering fresh perspectives on globalization, ethnic violence, social justice, and the biological roots of behavior. They take on such topics as the collapse of Yugoslavia, the consumer practices of the American poor, American foreign policy in the Balkans, and contemporary debates over race, welfare, and violence against women. In the clear, vigorous prose of the pundits themselves, these contributors reveal the hollowness of what often passes as prevailing wisdom and passionately demonstrate the need for a humanistically complex and democratic understanding of the contemporary world. Available: November 2004 Pub Date: January 2005

On a September day in 1863, Abdul Hamid entered the Central Asian city of Yarkand. Disguised as a merchant, Hamid was actually an employee of the Survey of India, carrying concealed instruments to enable him to map the geography of the area. Hamid did not live to provide a first-hand count of his travels. Nevertheless, he was the advance guard of an elite group of Indian trans-Himalayan explorers—recruited, trained, and directed by the officers of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India—who were to traverse much of Tibet and Central Asia during the next thirty years. Derek Waller presents the history of these explorers, who came to be called "native explorers" or "pundits" in the public documents of the Survey of India. In the closed files of the government of British India, however, they were given their true designation as spies. As they moved northward within the Indian subcontinent, the British demanded precise frontiers and sought orderly political and economic relationships with their neighbors. They were also becoming increasingly aware of and concerned with their ignorance of the geographical, political, and military complexion of the territories beyond the mountain frontiers of the Indian empire. This was particularly true of Tibet. Though use of pundits was phased out in the 1890s in favor of purely British expeditions, they gathered an immense amount of information on the topography of the region, the customs of its inhabitants, and the nature of its government and military resources. They were able to travel to places where virtually no European count venture, and did so under conditions of extreme deprivation and great danger. They are responsible for documenting an area of over one million square miles, most of it completely unknown territory to the West. Now, thanks to Waller's efforts, their contributions to history will no longer remain forgotten.

This book considers the production of political media content from the perspective of academics who are increasingly asked to join the ranks of voices charged with informing the public. The work draws on the authors’ first-hand experience and relationships with media reporters, managers, producers, and academics offering their expertise to a wide array of media outlets to understand and report on the dynamics shaping how the academic voice in political news may be at its most useful. Featured prominently in the book is the trade-off between a conventional form of political punditry, which is often characterized by partisan rancour, and a more analytical, theoretical, and/or policy-based approach to explaining politics to both general and diverse audiences. Along the way, the work draws on original survey, in-depth interview, and experimental data to garner insights on what academics in media, reporters, and media managers perceive are the appropriate roles for academics featured in political media. This book also contains relevant technical tips for effective media communication by academics.

This major new book tackles key questions on Europe in the context of shifting parameters of East and West. The contributors - sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and historians - show, from a variety of different perspectives, that the conventional equation of Europe with the West must be questioned. Featuring four thematically organized chapters, the book looks at: a post-Western world Asia in Europe: encounters in history between Europe and Asia otherness in Europe and Asia. Exploring new expressions of European self-understanding in a way that challenges recent ideological notions of the ‘clash of civilizations’, this outstanding work draws on recent scholarship that shows how Europe and Asia were mutually linked in history and in contemporary perspective. It argues that as a result of current developments and the changing geopolitical context, both Europe and Asia have much in common and that it is possible to speak of cosmopolitan links rather than clashes. This book will be of great value to students and researchers in the fields of sociology, European politics and history and cultural theory.

THERE'S NOWHERE TO HIDE FROM THE RUDE PUNDITIn the tradition of Abbie Hoffman, Bill Hicks, and Bill Maher, from the depths of the left side of the blogosphere, the Rude Pundit steps forth to defend the right to be liberal, to be sexually suspect, to be broke and pissed-off-and to make fun of Republicans all the time, all the time.Including:"Glenn Beck Is the New Martin Luther King (in Hell)""Nuns and Guns""Riding on an Airplane with Someone Who Talks to God"and profiles of great Americans of our time such as Tim Pawlenty, David Duke, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, Jeb Bush and many, many more!YOU'LL LAUGH YOU'LL CRY YOU'LL GET NAUSEATED YOU'LL GET AROUSED AND IT'S (almost) ALL TRUEFeaturing charming anecdotes, twisted poems, gonzo reportage, tragic photographs, meaningless charts, Founding Fathers in compromising positions, and much, much more.

"This book studies the interactions between presidential candidates and hosts on broadcast late-night talk shows in the United States. Using discourse analysis, the authors develop a comprehensive understanding of the entertainment-political interview as a cultural, interactional, and ideological genre"--

In the last several decades, there has been a surge of interest in expertise in the social scientific, philosophical, and legal literatures. While it is tempting to attribute this surge of interest in expertise to the emergence and consolidation of a "knowledge society," "post-industrial society," or "network society," it is more likely that the debates about expertise are symptomatic of significant change and upheaval. As the number of contenders for expert status has increased, as the bases for their claims have become more diverse, and as the struggles between these would-be experts intensified, expertise became problematic and contested. In The Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics, Gil Eyal and Thomas Medvetz have brought together a broad group of scholars who have engaged substantively and theoretically with debates regarding the nature of expertise and the social roles of experts to examine these areas within sociology and allied disciplines. The analyses take an historical and relational approach to the topic and are motivated by the sense that growing mistrust in experts represents a danger to democratic politics today. Among the topics considered here are the value and relevance of the boundary between experts and laypeople; the causes and consequences of mistrust in experts; the meanings and social uses of objectivity; and the significance of recent transformations in the organization of the professions. Bringing together investigations from social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars into the political dimensions of expertise, this Handbook connects interdisciplinary work done in science and technology studies with the more classic concerns, topics, and concepts of sociologists of professions and intellectuals.