The sixth filter

For thirty years, late-night television performed a specific media function that does not exist anywhere else in the American information ecosystem. It rendered the day’s news legible to a tired mass audience, applied skepticism to it, and delivered the result inside a comedy product that made the skepticism stick. That function had a name in the comms literature long before The Daily Show: it is what happens when an editorial layer translates upstream sources for a downstream audience without being a passive conduit. Adversarial translation. The host did the translation; the joke did the adversarial part; the network paid for both because the audience was big enough to justify it.