Saturday, October 18, 2008

The Daily Show's "Secret Weapon"

Great article about the guy behind the scenes, watching C-Span and the 24-hour news channels so you don't have to.
Chodikoff doesn’t use Google to turn up inconsistencies, preferring news stories on LexisNexis, and he ignores Wikipedia. Explaining why he prefers print over the Web, he cites a scene from the movie “Back to School,” when Rodney Dangerfield asks his son why he’s buying used books. “And he says, ‘Because they’re already underlined, see?’ And Rodney says, ‘But that guy could have been a maniac.’ And that’s the problem with the Internet.”

“You ever seen ‘The Godfather’?” said Chodikoff, a Moorestown, N.J., native who had entry-level gigs at several television shows before joining “The Daily Show” in its early days. “I’m like the guy taping the gun in the bathroom so that Jon can grab it and come out blazing.”

Behind Stewart’s grilling of former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith was Chodikoff with a file of what he calls “pure information.” In anticipation, “Jon basically had me disprove the entire Iraq war,” and Chodikoff saw the interview as a culmination of his work.

Here are clips from the Feith interview:



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