You know considering Jon Stewart and his Comedy Central gig The Daily Show actually gets quite a lot of media coverage in the UK, I am actually a little surprised that apart from a New Statesman blogger, no one else picked up on an intriguing story from this/last week.
Stewart ran a segment using footage from David Cameron answering questions on the phone hacking scandal, in the House of Commons. He compared it to C-SPAN and saluted David Cameron on withstanding the pounding he took answering MPs questions for nearly two hours.
Footage of Parliament is pretty widespread and common now that we have had 21 years to get used to it, but you only see it on news shows and documentaries. I mean why else would you have a need to show it? More4 shows a rather mangled international version of the Daily Show that I do not enjoy watching, but Channel 4 had to pull the episode in question.
This only came to my attention because yesterday Stewart alluded to the fact that the show had been pulled in the UK and replayed the footage again, possibly putting Channel 4 in exactly the same dilemma as it had with the previous episode if they had it scheduled for this week. I bet pretty much no one knew that Parliamentary footage cannot be used for comedic or satirical purposes.
As he points out you can see the show uncensored in Yemen, Somalia and Sudan, but not the UK, as the rules around use of footage from the Parliamentary estate is tightly controlled. But it is utterly ridiculous, and that footage of the HoC have been used on numerous occasions on the net.
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| Dazed and confused. |
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