John Stewart

A welcome return of Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, which is essentially a more incisive and, well, necessary version of his Screenwipe series, intent on exposing the bullshit of global news gathering. This opener was all about the media's history of scaremongering to churn up material; from the '80s (nuclear war, AIDS, salmonella, acid house music) through the '90s (the flesh-eating virus, road rage, Y2K) to the present day (terrorism, of course.)

The show is basically a slap to the face for anyone who believes whatever the press tell us, without questioning motivations and taking note of biases. It's wrapped in the guise of a more acerbic Daily Show-style comedy, but it gets its message across far louder and clearer than John Stewart could ever dream. I was particularly struck by the segment about the outbreak of Ebola in Zaire; it killed 250 people and was given extensive coverage around the world because "killer viruses" were in vogue at the time, but when Zaire fell into a civil war that killed 3 million people just a few years later, that atrocity went shamefully ignored because it didn't fit any established "storylines" or feel like a threat to westerners.

I heartily recommend you tune into Newswipe, if you're not doing so already. I think international readers would also enjoy this eye-opening, polemical series - particularly Americans, home of the execrable joke that is Fox news.

Dan Owen, Dan's Media Digest, 21st January 2010