The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has been on air since the 90's and is currently the longest running program on Comedy Central. The she has won many Emmy Awards, as has it's spinoff the Colbert Report. An analysis of the Daily Show is not easy, as the show represents a satirical news program mostly about American politics and other news coverage. There are multiple degrees of separation that make the overt references to race or sex difficult to analyze. For example, one "correspondent" of Stewarts, Larry Wilmore, is always introduced as "senior black correspondent" and is brought in to provide input on racially related stories.
In this particular episode Wilmore is commenting on the recent reports of employees of the retailer Barneys New York harassing black customers, one even being arrested by an undercover cop, and what that means for Jay-Z, who negotiated a business deal with Barneys.
Other correspondents include the stereotypical British guy, John Oliver, the stereotypical crazy white lady, Samantha Bee, the stereotypical middle eastern guy Aasif Mandvi, and many others. More often than not, Jon turns to them and indicates his disgust at the current story for reasons that are easily identifiable, like racism, sexism, lying, cheating, etc, and the job of the correspondent is to turn it around on him in a way that is funny. In the above example, Wilmore instead supposes that Jay-Z no longer represents or cares about disenfranchised black people, and that he broke a new barrier in the fight against racism by being able to sell out to companies only whites had been able to sell out to before.
The Stewart does seem to be the first to point out any kind of insensitivity that the other networks they critique have in their shows. First up on the chopping block is usually Fox News, a widely circulated clip of Stewart unraveling the daytime host's claim that the show "never refers to others as Nazi's" by showing clips of members of the network making the exact reference, even within a few hours of her making said claim.
According to the encoding/decoding model presented by Martin and Nakayama (365) Stewart and his writers are performing the decoding portion, then encoding a new message, which the consumer then decodes again. This is an interesting style of media as it often represents media that the consumer would not normally access. Another them presented in Martin and Nakayama is Reader Profiles, this is the idea that pop culture producers, mostly magazines, keep track of and reference their audience on a frequent and substantial basis (365). This is actually a much more important issue in the world of partisan politics, where news stations create similar "viewer profiles" that represent their target audience. Stewart and his writers are very in tune with this and their interpretation of certain aspects of other stations news stories provide a large proportion of their material.
It is unlikely that culture could be delivered in any form through The Daily Show, except perhaps the attitude that people should question what they hear from the news rather than accept it.
Martin, J. N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2010). Intercultural communication in contexts (6th ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill.
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