News Satire Roundup: April 1st

Sunday, April 1 – John opened on Ronny Jackson as the new VA secretary (featuring pictures demonstrating how far off-base Jackson was on Trump’s physical,) then moved onto Egypt’s sham election and Sinclair Broadcast Group forcing local anchors to air a must-run piece on “fake news.”  The main story, on immigration courts, was devastating.  As one clip stated, the broken system conducts “death penalty cases in a traffic court setting.”  The discrepancy between deportation rates in various cities was awful, and I was horrified by the fact that detained immigrants have no guaranteed right to an attorney, including unaccompanied minors as young as two years old – anyone who thinks that isn’t a repulsive miscarriage of justice deserves none of my respect.  And of course, John pointed to cases where deportation is a literal death sentence, showing such high-stakes cases handled in such a distracted, slipshod manner.

The last couple of months, I’ve liked The Daily Show’s pieces looking at Black history and women’s history.  Roy’s “CP Time” pieces and Desi and Dulcé’s “Shafted” series were both great ways to observe the history for each month.  I like how Roy’s stories each centered around a theme, such as Black inventors, Black people in politics, and Black women in history; it was a neat way to pick up a lot of interesting bits of information.  In contrast, each of Dulcé and Desi’s stories focused on just one woman, and they all had the same theme of a woman who didn’t get credit for her innovation (Sarah Howe got to enjoy the fruits of her labors the longest, but history caught up with her eventually – it’s called a “Ponzi scheme,” not a “Howe scheme.”)

What I particularly like about both of these series is that neither spent much time on the big-name figures:  MLK, George Washington Carver, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Emily Dickinson, and so on.  Instead, we looked at people we might not have heard of before – I know I hadn’t heard of many of them.  So often, we use Black History Month or Women’s History Month to rehash the same few stories we retell every year, and while those stories are certainly important and need to be told, repetition and ritualization of them can create a false sense that those are the only pieces of Black and/or women’s history worth telling.  When in truth, there’s so much.  There are a ton of fascinating people from history who did wild or amazing things, people we don’t find as well-represented in our history books, and the more opportunities we take to discover them, the better.

It’d be cool to see the show repeat these series every year, each time with even more stories that have gone largely untold.  What’s more, I’d love for them to do the same with other history/heritage months, although I recognize that some might be tougher than others – mainly due to the availability of representatives from those groups.  For instance, Ronny and/or Hasan could cover Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (May,) but what about Gay Lesbian Pride Month (June), or National Hispanic-Latino Heritage Month (mid-September through mid-October?)  I could see more reluctance to set up a recurring segment like that if they don’t have any correspondents who fit those identities, but I still think those stories would be worth telling.  Maybe, if they didn’t have correspondent to fill in, they could bring in guests to do it?  Tell me Laverne Cox wouldn’t love presenting short pieces on LGBTQ history.