Scholars have increasingly turned their attention to understanding and assessing the impact of faux news anchors Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, and Stephen Colbert, host of The Daily Show spinoff The Colbert Report. While important work has been done to illustrate the impact of these shows on political participation and public discourse they are still placed within traditional notions of political knowledge and civic participation. Such characterizations remain incomplete for understanding the lasting role Stewart and Colbert may play in contemporary journalism. In this article I contend that Stewart and Colbert are performing underappreciated roles as public journalists as well as serving to re-envision a mass mediated public journalism for the 21st century. Ultimately, through the use of humor, Stewart and Colbert invite a heightened sense of participation in public life in the contemporary mass mediated landscape, adhering to the principles and promises of public journalism.
In December 2020, Major League Baseball announced a decision to formally include records of Negro League Baseball games as ‘official’ Major League status. Against the backdrop of widespread protests for social justice and discourses surrounding racial reckoning occurring during that same year, the decision garnered heightened importance given baseball’s symbolic resonance within US public culture. This essay asserts this decision, and the coverage it received among prominent sports outlets, reveal a rhetorical hierarchy wherein “Major League Baseball” status serves to legitimize the historical contributions of Negro League players via an act of statistical integration. In granting official “Major League” status to the Negro Leagues, Major League Baseball operates from a position of institutional legitimacy, statistically integrating the Negro Leagues via an act of mortification. Ultimately this serves to rhetorically construct a post-racial history of the game and reassert the legitimacy of baseball’s statistical record. The implications of this analysis for scholars of sport, rhetoric, and public memory are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.