According to the Boston Globe, Jon Stewart shaped the cultural attitudes of a generation. Many others seem to agree. For me, that’s harsh. I see no call to insult the man as he steps down.
The generation in question, or so I keep reading, relies on a comedy show for its news, and engages with politics mainly through jokes. Perhaps I’m missing something, but that seems less than ideal. “The Daily Show,” it’s said, conveys more information to its viewers than the typical network news program. I wouldn’t be surprised — it would be hard not to. Nonetheless, there’s something wrong with a generation whose involvement with politics is mostly confined to laughing at it.
Don’t misunderstand me. It’s good to mock politicians. I spent my childhood and most of my adult life in Britain, and for many years was an avid consumer of its cruel political satire. Coming to America, like most British immigrants, I found a country strangely lacking in appreciation for nonsense and irony. I ought to have found “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” refreshing exceptions to the rule — and did, in fact, to begin with. Gradually they seemed to confirm the underlying problem.
I dare say the show began as a parody of the network news program — a worthy target indeed, with its portentous anchormen and their sidekicks, hyperactive graphics, over-excited music and all the other idiotic conventions of the genre. But somewhere along the line “The Daily Show” cast itself, or allowed itself to be recast, not as a parody of that format but as a competing supplier.
Stewart didn’t satirize the anchorman — he became another anchorman, smarter and funnier than the rest. The program came to lack a sense of its own absurdity. (If you’re curious to see what a satirical assault on the news broadcast looks like, watch some clips from “Brass Eye” or “The Day Today,”creations of Christopher Morris, a wayward genius of British TV satire.)
That might have been all right. The problem was, the program’s fans began to take it seriously, academics with nothing better to do began to take it seriously, and worst of all the show began to take itself seriously. That is to say, American values asserted themselves. The torrent of grief over Stewart’s retirement reminds me of the rending of garments over the plight of The New Republic, another cultural icon. First that, now this. Sometimes it’s hard to go on.
Stewart famously expressed disapproval of Crossfire, the CNN shouting-match format. The spoof anchorman found it unseemly —an unserious way to engage in political discussion. The network closed the show down. He attacked Jim Cramer, the hysterical loud-mouth stock-tipper, saying he lacked journalistic integrity. Cramer turns the dull world of investing into entertainment; Stewart turns the dull world of politics into entertainment. You see the difference.
But in the end my main problem with “The Daily Show” was that it just became boring. Clip of politician saying something stupid. Extended shot of Stewart’s operatic incredulity. Audience roars, cheers, whoops. Repeat endlessly. And do it every day, because it’s “The Daily Show.” (Again, only in America.) The format seemed clapped out to me a long time ago, but the sheer heroic stamina of performers like Stewart and Colbert remained nothing short of miraculous.
Stewart’s a good comedian and a very smart guy — smart enough, I bet, to see the problem. Once you’ve finished laughing at politics, you have to engage with it to get anything done.
Clive Crook is a Bloomberg View columnist and a member of the Bloomberg View editorial board.
Stewart made news and politics matter to many
By Zara Kessler
Bloomberg News
NBC News anchor Brian Williams enjoys the limelight. But Tuesday night, he must have been happy to share it. Williams, we found out, has been suspended without pay for six months. By the time we heard of his punishment, we’d learned that “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart will leave his post — permanently — later this year.
There’s only so much space in the news media navel, so the two stories jockeyed for our gaze in the after hours. In an evening of bad news for the news industry, however, Stewart’s announcement is the heavier blow.
The nightly news at NBC will go on, anchored by Lester Holt until Williams does or does not return. But since Stewart took over “The Daily Show” on Viacom’s Comedy Central in 1999, satirical news has supplanted network news in importance. A television landscape without Williams is a less sunny place; without Stewart it’s a troubling one. Along with his Comedy Central accomplice Stephen Colbert (a “Daily Show” veteran), he made the funny news matter more than the real thing. (John Oliver, another “Daily Show” graduate, is gamely making his HBO comedy show a venue for similarly useful satire.)
Network news may be a slowly diminishing breed, with the kind of older audience that makes advertisers yawn, but it still dominates the seat-of-the-pants production of “The Daily Show.” The average “NBC Nightly News” audience in 2008 was 8.56 million; by 2013, it was down only slightly to 8.43 million, according to Nielsen Media Research.
In the last week of January, “The Daily Show” had an average of 1.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen; that same week an average of 9.9 million viewers watched “NBC Nightly News.” A 2012 Pew Research Center survey found that 39 percent of regular “Daily Show” viewers were 18-29, compared with 9 percent of network evening viewers. When asked four questions “to measure knowledge of political news and current events,” Daily Show viewers were significantly more likely to ace the test.
It’s not surprising. Just as Tina Fey did far more to shape interpretations of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, R, in 2008 than the evening news, Stewart built the context — a liberal one, surely — to house some of our most crucial facts. As CNN’s Stephen Collinson wrote:
“When the Iraq war turned into a quagmire, Stewart turned his searing wit on the Bush administration’s missteps and failures of the occupation with his long-running “Mess O’ Potamia” segment. His daily lambasting of top Bush aides reflected and helped to shape the fast-souring public mood on the war, which eventually provided the conditions for the rise of anti-war candidate Barack Obama in 2008”.
There is also anecdotal evidence that “The Daily Show” matters more to some of the people who matter more.
“I don’t watch a lot of TV news. I don’t watch cable at all. I like ‘The Daily Show,’ so sometimes if I’m home late at night, I’ll catch snippets of that. I think Jon Stewart’s brilliant. It’s amazing to me the degree to which he’s able to cut through a bunch of the nonsense — for young people in particular, where I think he ends up having more credibility than a lot of more conventional news programs do.”
That’s not a quote from a focus-group of millennials in Kalamazoo. It’s from a 2012 Rolling Stone interview with President Barack Obama. He seems like a pretty good source.
Zara Kessler is an editor for Bloomberg News.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
