How does The Daily Show get its get news clips?

Factual Questions
1

So I’m watching a DVR’d episode of The Daily Show (the one where Stewart eviscerates that Doocy guy from Fox 'n Friends for his Obama/Maddrassa thing) and I’m wondering how does TDS get the rights to use that footage?

The Fox guy looked like an idiot and was handily ridiculed - why would FNC agree to allow that? Do they have a choice? Is there some kind of public domain agreement for news items?

For that matter, how do they get ANY footage (MSNBC, CNN, Headline News etc)

Just curious.

Thanks.

  • I am [actually not] a scientist
2

This is just a guess, but because TDS does satire and commentary, their use of short clips of otherwise copyrighted material would tend to fall under Fair Use. So, they do not need permission to use it, nor would they have to pay.

3

Ironically perhaps, Comedy Central doesn’t want people showing clips from the Daily Show or the Colbert Report.

http://www.newscloud.com/read/75528

4

I would expect that Fox, CNN, et al don’t particularly like The Daily Show using their clips either. However, there isn’t much they can do as long as short clips are used in commenting on or criticising the copyrighted work.

5

right you are, it seems (I mean, if those dopes at Stanford are to be believed)

6

In television in general, it’s usually considered fair use to use short clips of other stations’ video so long as you credit the source, which is why you often see supers saying “Courtesy of Wxxx” over sports highlights and such. I have occasionally seen local stations fight over the use of “exclusive” video, though usually only when the game is still in progress. (Personally, I’ve never understood why a sports guy would give the score of an in-progress game that is airing on the competition, since the folks in your audience who had forgotten about it will promptly tune out.)

7

As I recall, Viacom owns both Comedy Central AND CBS. I would think that Viacom uses CBS somehow, and then simply passes off to Comedy.

8

I’ve seen news shows use clips of the Daily Show as well (and usually without much commentary so much as “look at this funny thing that was said about current events” used to fill out the final minute or so before a commercial break), so it goes both ways.

Possibly I’ve only seen this on news shows that share a parent company with Comedy Central, I’m not sure.

9

As a slight aside, I remember seeing Jon Stewart relate an anecdote wherein someone or other asked a very similar question–how do you find those clips of politicians contradicting themselves and such? His reply was something to the effect of “we have a clerk and a video tape machine.”