Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert
The War on Bullshit
Abel Thijssen
abeljanthijssen@gmail.com Student Number: 10187340 Faculty of Humanities: American Studies Thesis Advisor: mw. Dr. M.S. Manon Parry
Inhoud
Chapter 1: An introduction...3
1.1 Stewart and Colbert...3
1.3 Thesis...5
1.4 Content...5
Chapter 2: The War on Bullshit...7
2.1 Irony...7
2.2 News versus entertainment...8
2.3 “The O’Reilly Factor”...11
2.4 Conclusion...14
Chapter 3: Jon Stewart...16
3.1 Stewarts “Mission Statement”...16
3.2 Comedians on Bullshit...17
3.3 “Teachers” on Bullshit...19
3.4 Stewart: The Anointed Jester...22
3.5 Stewart in Crossfire...24
3.6 Conclusion...27
Chapter 4: Stephen Colbert...29
4.1 A line in the sand...29
4.2 Colbert vis-à-vis Stewart...30
4.3 The Colbert Report...31
4.4 Colbert Super PAC “Americans for A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow”...34
4.5 Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner...36
4.6 ‘The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’...40
4.7 Conclusion...41
Chapter 5: Conclusions...42
5.1 Were Stewart and Colbert successful in their War on Bullshit?...42
5.2 Epilogue...44 Bibliography...47 Show segments...47 Web articles...48 YouTube...49 Articles...50 Books...51 Other...51
Chapter 1: An introduction
1.1 Stewart and Colbert
On August 6, 2015 Jon Stewart said farewell to The Daily Show. He had hosted the late-night comedy show famously for almost sixteen years. From each Monday through Thursday night Stewart would deconstruct the news while making his audience laugh. Stephen Colbert was a “senior correspondent” on The Daily Show, who eventually got to host his own spin-off series in October 2005, called The Colbert Report. This program was a parody of personality-driven pundit show. Colbert, in his own words, portrayed a “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot”.1 Both programs were incredibly popular, each of them winning two Peabody Awards and a great number of other prestigious accolades. Sociologist Jeffrey C. Goldfarb even described Stewart and Colbert as “two of the leading critical American intellectuals of our time”.2 Colbert retired his character in 2014, when he left Comedy Central and became David Letterman’s successor at CBS, as host of The Late Show. The Daily Show, in turn, recruited a new host.
Stewarts successor, the South African comedian Trevor Noah, began his first show by honoring Stewart for his comic benevolence: “[i] can only assume that this is as strange for you as it is for me. Jon Stewart was more than just a Late Night host. He was often our voice, our refuge, and in many ways our political dad. And it’s weird, because dad has left, and now it feels like the family has a new stepdad, and he is black. Which is not ideal”. Noah was obviously amusing the audience with this remark (being a man of color himself), but his gratitude is sincere. As the following quote reveals:
[m]any people are part of the reason I’m sitting here today, but above all I would be remiss I if I didn’t acknowledge one man, and that’s Jon Stewart. Thank you Jon. Thank you for believing in me. I’m not quite sure what you saw in me, but I’ll work hard every day to find it, and I’ll make you not look like the crazy old dude who left his inheritance to some random kid from Africa. And to you, The Daily Show viewer, both new and old, at home or on your phone, thank you for joining us as we continue the War on Bullshit. 3
1 Deborah Solomon, ‘Funny About the News’, The New York Times Magazine (25-09-2005) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/magazine/funny-about-the-news.html (02-07-2017).
2 Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, ‘Civility and subversion revisited: twenty-first century media intellectuals as ideologists and anti-ideologists’ in International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 25 (2012) 145.
3‘Trevor Continues the War on Bulls**t’, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, season 21, episode 1, Comedy Central (28-09-2015) http://www.comedycentral.co.uk/the-daily-show/videos/trevor-noah-vows-to-continue-the-war-on-bullshit (09-06-2017).
Noah seems to be entrusted with a most peculiar responsibility, for what does this war on bullshit actually entail? To “declare war” on a particular problem has become a customary metaphor in the United States. Over time, the American people have witnessed how politicians have launched the war on terror, poverty, drugs and cancer, just to name a few.4 Even issues that might seem petty are addressed in this fashion. Each year conservatives for instance mobilize against the supposed “War on Christmas”, which arises from the belief that secular society is removing the Christ from Christmas and therefore poses a threat to traditional American values.5 This phrase obviously has a certain sway when it comes to governmental policies and news headlines. The “War on Bullshit”, however, is not paraded around by politicians or pundits as a fearmongering slogan, but it certainly does provide an adequate understanding of America’s modern media landscape and the role that news parody shows like The Daily Show have in this environment, or are considered of having.
Noah is not the only one who carries on Stewart’s legacy, for it seems that a spate of political and news satire shows have taken America’s television landscape by storm. First and foremost are Full Frontal with Samantha Bee on TBS (which began in February, 2016), and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO (launched in April, 2014). Hosted by former Daily Show correspondents, these programs have each risen to critical acclaim with their own distinctive style.6 According to Hadley Freeman from The Guardian, Samantha Bee infuriates her audience into “acting on serious issues”, while a Time article celebrated John Oliver’s ability to “turn boring topics into viral phenomena through online video as motivation for the new initiative”.7 8 In the wake of Stewart’s retirement, other comedians have jumped on the political bandwagon as well. Seth Meyers, host of NBC’s Late Night, now has a segment on his show called “A Closer Look”, in which he satirizes the day’s events, “with incisive humor and a calm hand”.9 Then there is the preexisting Saturday Night Live, a comedy institution 4Moisés Naím, ‘Mixed metaphors: why the wars on cancer, poverty, drugs, terror, drunk driving, teen
pregnancy, and other ills can’t be won’ in Foreign Policy 178 (April, 2010) 112.
5 Jeffrey P. Jones, ‘Fox & Friends: political talk’ in How to watch television (New York, New York University Press, 2013) 189.
6 Hadley Freeman, ‘Jon Stewart: why I quit The Daily Show’, The Guardian (18-04-2015)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/18/jon-stewart-why-i-quit-the-daily-show (10-06-17). 7 Elize Czajkowski, ‘Is the 2016 presidential campaign beyond satire?’, The Guardian (06-07-2016)
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/jul/06/political-comedy-election-donald-trump-stephen-colbert (10-06-17).
8 Victor Luckerson, ‘How the “John Oliver effect” is having a real-life impact’, Time (10-07-2015) http://time.com/3674807/john-oliver-net-neutrality-civil-forfeiture-miss-america/ (21-06-2017). 9 Czajkowski, ‘Is the 2016 presidential campaign beyond satire?’, The Guardian (06-07-2016)
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/jul/06/political-comedy-election-donald-trump-stephen-colbert (10-06-17).
that has parodied U.S. presidents and other political figures ever since its inception in 1975. During the 2016 presidential race between Donald J. Trump and Hilary Clinton (which is described as the “most polarizing election in modern American history”), these comedy shows were provided with an excellent opportunity to continue Stewart’s “War on Bullshit”. The question then remains: who constructed or brought this so called war into being? Who was Jon Stewart for example supposed to be waging battle against? And what was Stephen Colbert’s role in this endeavor?
1.3 Thesis
In this thesis I will examine how Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert rose to prominence as two leading critical American comedians. I will show how their work resonated with a large audience that sought political refuge during a time when the news media did not seem to have their best interests at heart. I will focus my thesis on the roles that Stewart and Colbert played in “The War on Bullshit” (were they successful?). Therefore, I will be drawing on the extensive research of media scholars such as Jeffrey P. Jones and Geoffrey Baym who have frequently touched on the subject of “serious comedy” and the demise of America’s media landscape.
1.4 Content
Chapter 2 is a “recon chapter” that focusses on the excesses of cable news networks, and the narrative of decline that has enshrouded America’s political discourse over the past few decades, while it simultaneously shows what made The Daily Show with Jon Stewart almost seem like a necessary force for good. Therefore, I will be drawing on the work of both media scholars and journalist. This chapter will also in include the work of sociologist Matthew Norton, who as an interesting take on the strategies that shows like The O’Reilly Factor use to efficiently attain viewers.10 First, however, I will assess an essay of novelist David Foster Wallace in order to give a small impression of the possible dangers that irony and ridicule might pose, when they are used as “weapons” against an enemy that makes use of the same vices. This chapter does not end with a conventional conclusion, for it only seeks to establish 10 According to reporter Oliver Darcy of CNN, Bill O’Reilly was fired from Fox News “after an explosive New York Times report published in April revealed that he and the network had paid millions to settle sexual harassment lawsuits filed against him over the years — including two after former chairman Roger Ailes was ousted in the wake of his own sexual harassment scandal last summer” (2017).
a proficient understanding of America’s modern media landscape. In Chapter 3, I will disclose what the so-called ‘War on Bullshit’ actually entailed, as I discuss Stewart’s rise to prominence as host of The Daily Show. At the same time, I will take a closer look a Stewart’s persona. What brought this benevolent image into being, and what are its implications? Stewart caused a public outcry when he announced his retirement in February 2015. Amy Davidson, a staff writer for The New Yorker, wrote that his timing could not have been worse. The title of her article was quite telling: “Jon Stewart we need you in 2016”. This chapter will show why. Chapter 4 focusses on Colbert’s role in ‘The War on Bullshit’. He and his former employer shared the same mission, but they carried it out in a completely different fashion. As Colbert told Rolling Stone Magazine in September 2009: “Jon deconstruct the news in a really brilliant comedic style. I take the sausage backwards, and I restuff the sausage. We deconstruct, but then we don’t show anybody our deconstruction. We reconstruct – we falsely construct the hypocrisy. And I embody the bullshit until hopefully you can smell it”. The Colbert Report was a parody of the archetype opinionated pundit program (The O’Reilly Factor basically). The host, a character that Colbert developed during his time at The Daily Show, was a self-satisfied right-wing political commentator. As such, he aspired after “truthiness” instead of genuine facts. Colbert introduced this concept during the very first episode of The Colbert Report. It became so popular that the American Dialect Society voted “truthiness” 2005 ‘Word of the Year’. According to institution’s website it “refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart”. This act has made Colbert incredibly popular. Chapter 5 will conclude this thesis by revisiting some of the main arguments. It will also provide a small reflection on role of political satire and the presidency of Donald J. Trump.
The sources that are used in this research include, popular web articles, YouTube video’s, show segments of both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and an extensive apparatus of scholarly argumentation that can be found in articles, books, and lectures.
Chapter 2: The War on Bullshit
2.1 Irony
In his essay ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’ (1993), novelist David Foster Wallace expressed concern about the use of irony and ridicule in a new literary subgenre that sought to free the American public from the clutches of televised entertainment. The problem being that U.S. television had already imposed a form of deconstructive irony on itself in order to appeal to the viewer’s sense of individualism, while simultaneously keeping the entire audience fixated on whatever message it wished to divulge.11 This is commonly seen in ads that make fun of ad conventions. Instead of addressing the masses with a lofty image of a happy family and their new Chrysler minivan, a smart commercial would mock TV’s adaptation of family values in order to manipulate the consumer. Such an ad protects itself from scorn and forces the lone viewer (who Wallace calls “Joe Briefcase”) to discern the irony at play.12 It thereby congratulates him for not being one of those people who still fall for “old commercial virtues of authority and sincerity”.13 To watch a popular television program that uses the same tongue-in-cheek tactic, writes Wallace, evokes a sentiment that entangles the lone viewer and never lets him go, as “to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about seeing through the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it’s taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling”.14 Although this essay was published almost 25 years ago, its point is still highly relevant. Many scholars believe that U.S. television, as opposed to Wallace’s take on the matter, has turned into something far more corrupting over the years, and that in the middle of this transformation Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert arose to mend the damage.
In his essay, Wallace shows that irony is highly entertaining, and that it can be an effective rhetorical tool for debunking hypocrisy. However, it cannot solve or replace the many societal flaws it tends to address. Wallace quotes essayist Lewis Hyde on this issue:
11 David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: television and U.S. fiction’ in Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (1993) 178.
12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid, 180.
[i]rony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage”.15
According to Wallace, televised entertainment is “the epitome of low art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people”.16 Like a drug, it dictates our lives and offers a solution for the very problems it causes. As previously mentioned, this “self-nourishing cycle” is strengthened by ways of clever commercialization.17 Ironic ads, modern sitcoms, or other forms of commercial-embedded programming invite the lone viewer to become part of the joke and allows him to transcend the masses. That is the eerie beauty of the all-encompassing power of America’s “televisual culture” as Wallace described it in 1993. More frightening, however, is the fact that cable news networks have adapted a very similar strategy over the years. In an article published Political Communication in 2005, media expert Geoffrey Baym claims that “the once-authoritative nightly news has been fractured, replaced by a variety of programming strategies ranging from the latest version of network ‘news lite’ to local news happy talk and 24-hour cable news punditry”.18 Baym, who actually used to produce news, clearly believes that this noble medium no longer serves the American electorate, and that it too has become “low art”. However, he also claims that the ensuing deterioration of America’s national discourse gave way to comedians such as Stewart and Colbert. The remainder of this chapter will show exactly how this came to be.
2.2 News versus entertainment
When Baym discusses the demise of broadcast journalism he elaborates on Foucault’s idea that society is best understood as a framework of specific domains of cultural practice, or different kinds of “discursive formations”.19 These neat little islands are defined by conceptual boundaries which simultaneously constrained the ways in which each domain was to be recognized and discussed.20 ‘Politics’ and ‘aesthetics’, as such, were two different realms and each realm had its own discourse, in which only a limited amount of people are authorized to
15 David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: television and U.S. fiction’ in Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (1993) 183.
16 Ibid, 162. 17 Ibid, 163.
18 Geoffrey Baym, ‘Serious comedy: expanding the boundaries of political discourse’ in Laughing matters: humor and American politics in the Media Age (New York, Routledge, 2008) 24.
19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.
address particular subjects.21 This division was supposedly upheld when network television became the central location of political discourse after the widespread adoption of television in the 1950s. Back then, political talk programming mostly featured reporters who would interview government officials in order to shine a light on important events. Shows like Meet the Press on NBC (1947) and Face the Nation on CBS (1954), two of the longest running news programs in America, were initially based on the principle that these impartial journalists were the only ones who could analyze what was happening in the political arena, and that they tried to do so in a most professional manner.22 According to Baym, news and public affairs programming were hence seen as directly contrasting with the aesthetic-expressive content that filled the rest of the television screen, and “[f]or many, it became common sense that politics should be neatly distinguishable from the aesthetic, the former rational argument, the latter expressive and affective; that news, and not entertainment, should be where we learn about the political; and that news itself should be serious and dispassionate”.23 Only in this postmodern media environment, with its ever-increasing number of channels, the boundaries between aesthetics and politics are “blurred”, and with that it becomes harder to identify the division between news and entertainment.24
Baym shares this view with Jeffrey P. Jones, Director of the ‘George Foster Peabody Awards’, the prestigious accolade that seeks to “spotlight instances of how electronic media can teach, expand our horizons, defend the public interest, or encourage empathy with others”.25 The two scholars have collaborated on several occasions, and both have published numerous works about the likes of Stewart, Colbert, and the satirical news format. In Entertaining Politics: Satiric Television and Political Engagement (2010), Jones argues that a series of societal changes, that began to take hold in the late 1980s and early 1990s, helped to create a “cultural environment in which political struggles are increasingly played out in cultural forums such as talk shows”, and an “economic environment where media industries competitively struggle to create programs and channels that are cheap to produce yet innovative, and popular with audience tastes".26 One of these changes, was the fact that more 21 Ibid., 25.
22 Jeffrey P. Jones, Entertaining politics: satiric television and political engagement (Plymouth, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010) 44.
23 Baym, ‘Serious Comedy’ in Laughing matters (New York, Routledge, 2008) 26.
24 Geoffrey Baym, ‘The Daily Show: discursive integration and the reinvention of political journalism’ in Political Communication 22 (2005) 262.
25 Jeffrey P. Jones, ‘Message from the director’ http://www.peabodyawards.com/about (21-07-2017). 26 Jones, Entertaining politics (Plymouth, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010) 51.
and more politicians began to explore alternative ways of communicating with the public. Just like Ronald Reagan, these politicians championed themselves to be outsiders (Trump was not the first politician who claimed that he would “drain the swamp”).27 They appeared on talk shows where they riled crowds with populist rhetoric, purchased airtime for controversial campaign ads, and even became on-air personalities after their departure from government. As a result, the American public grew weary of the traditional political arena, just like it had developed a disdain for lofty commercials with Chrysler-driving families. TV producers took advantage of this growing sentiment, by offering new forms of political talk programming, which further eroded the boundaries between discursive formations.28
This “post-network period” not only saw new fluidity between the fields of politics and entertainment, but also the fragmentation of the overall media environment. As viewership migrated away from the traditional evening newscasts of the “oligopolistic broadcast networks” to other news sources, media enterprises that struggled to produce and sell cable television news became embroiled in a “cut-throat competition” for audience share.29 In order to obtain a substantial amount of viewers, programmers hence needed to differentiate their framework and subject-matter, which according to Jones resulted in an aesthetic tendency toward excessive style: “Style became the subject, the defining practice of television as a means of attaining a distinctive look in the battle for audience share. Excessive style, however, is more than simply a visual phenomenon. Instead, it becomes a means of developing a ‘look’ by individualizing programs in viewer’s mind”.30 Style has in this case as much to do with content, as with visual appearance. This notion is most important, as it signifies exactly that which many scholars (and reporters for that matter) deem is wrong with broadcast journalism today.
Baym and Jones are not the only ones who believe that U.S. television news has undergone a tremendous transformative change. Scholars in a wide variety of disciplines have conducted a vast amount of research to assess the effects of “infotainment”.31They conclude that broadcast journalism has moved away from traditional news values such as verification, proportion, relevance, depth, and quality of interpretation.32 Instead it panders to sensationalism, partisanship, bias, speculation and assertion. The critique comes from within 27 Ibid, 48.
28 Jones, Entertaining politics (Plymouth, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010) 51.
29 Jeffrey P. Jones, ‘The new news as no news: US cable news channels as branded political entertainment television’ in Media international Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 144 (2012) 148.
30 Jones, Entertaining politics (Plymouth, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010) 53.
31 Jones, ‘The new news as no news’ in Media international Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 144 (2012) 147.
the industry as well as from scholars who study it. Journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel claim in their book Warp Speed: America in the age of mixed media (1999), in which they argue that the coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal set a new low for American journalism. It is also what drove award-winning reporter Bonnie M. Anderson (CNN and NBC) to deliver a fierce critique on the financial imperatives of corporate news networks in News Flash: journalism, infotainment, and the bottom-line business of broadcast news (2004). She argues that broadcast networks have sacrificed the integrity of news, as their drive for profit forces “ethical backsliding” or cutbacks that compromise the quality of the content.33 When Anderson was vice-president of recruiting at CNN in 2001, she witnessed firsthand how “appearance” instead of “experience” was suddenly deemed more valuable when it came to hiring new television reporters. In her view, broadcast journalism has been overrun by money-hungry reporters who are treated like celebrities rather than as journalists: “When the increasingly rare example of good solid journalism is seen on television screens these days, you can be sure it is the work of nearly extinct professional newsmen and newswomen fighting the good fight for a free, responsible press against all odds”.34 Like so many before her, Anderson considers the intrusion of entertainment into news to be a true epidemic, and at the heart of this crisis is the upsurge of opinionated punditry.
2.3 “The O’Reilly Factor”
Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC are the three most competitive 24-hour cable news channels in America’s media industry, and their prime time news schedules have been dominated by news analysis programs for many years. Shows such as Hannity, Hardball with Chris Matthews or The Kelly File can be found strewn across television channels, and have been increasingly replacing conventional news.35 The format itself mainly consists of a reporter or pundit who discusses and debates particular issues from the news with guests that come on the show. Usually, these guests have a political view that deviates from the program’s “partisan political line”, which creates “a mixture of conflict and consensus” between the respective guest and the host.36 Now there seems nothing wrong with an adequate forum where topics are debated 32 Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel, Warp speed: America in the age of mixed media (New York, The Century Foundation Press, 1999) 9.
33 Bonnie M. Anderson, News flash: journalism, infotainment, and the bottom-line business of broadcast news (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 2004) 9.
34 Ibid, 6.
35 Matthew Norton, ‘A structural hermeneutics of The O’Reilly Factor’ in Theory and Society 40 (2011) 316. 36 Ibid.
from different points of view, but according to Baym these shows have devolved into bizarre yelling matches between partisan players who try more to “shout down the other side” than construct a compelling argument.37 Especially hosts with a more conservative outlook are deemed to be “emotionally pointed political provocateurs” who are incapable of having a sophisticated political discussion. This is perhaps best illustrated by the late Christopher Hitchens. During the elections of 2008, Hitchens was invited to defend his endorsement of Barack Obama on The O’Reilly Factor. Subbing in for O’Reilly was political commentator Laura Ingraham, who was rather incredulous as to how Hitchens could support Obama.38 After a minute-long rant she finally asked Hitchens why he did not like John McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin, to which Hitchens retorted in a swift exhibition of wit: “I thought you’d never ask, you must let me on more often and tell me what you think”.39 In sum, these news analysis programs are repeatedly accused of sidestepping “the messy nuances of complex political issues” in favor of a more simplistic discourse that is mostly based on melodrama, misrepresentative exaggeration, and ridicule.40
Surely it is rather odd to invite someone on a show, and then not give this person the opportunity to share his or her point of view. However, according to Professor Matthew Norton in ‘A structural hermeneutics of The O’Reilly Factor’ (2011) this performance is part of a complex formula that has made news analysis programs so watchable: “These shows construct the illusion of political victory in an arena of discourse using a variety of meaning making techniques that connect any given episode to the day's news, as well as connecting episodes to each other through the creation of a recognizable interpretive style that becomes the show's signature and its identity”.41 In order to present their perspective as a plausible interpretive achievement, instead of a foreordained conclusion, news analysis programs like The O’Reilly Factor thus rely on a number of identifiable elements.42 The most important of these is probably the need for a “mediated icon” who represents the salient characteristics of a humble and hardworking individual who has earned the right to be outraged with society.43 37 Baym, ‘Serious Comedy’ in Laughing matters (New York, Routledge, 2008) 28.
38 Nicholas Graham, ‘Christopher Hitchens: McCain “Losing capacity, he’s just not quite the man he was”’, Huffpost (20-11-2008) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/20/christopher-hitchens-mcca_n_136351.html (08-06-2017).
39 ‘Hitchens Defends Obama Endorsement’, YouTube, uploaded by ThePatriotsMaxims (21-10-2008) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzmXa8ylHfA (08-06-2017).
40 Sobieraj, Berry, Connors, ‘Outrageous political opinion and political anxiety in the US’ in Poetics 41 (2013) 408.
41 Norton, ‘A structural hermeneutics of The O’Reilly Factor’ in Theory and Society 40 (2011) 317. 42 Ibid, 341.
Bill O’Reilly is obviously the embodiment of this persona according to Norton’s assessment. The infamous host of The O’Reilly Factor never failed to emphasize that he is just a working-class citizen who is always willing to challenge the prevailing wisdom in the name of justice and truth.44 On his show (which was broadcasted by Fox News) O’Reilly tried to extend and intensify every subject, whether it is police violence or gun control, by connecting it with overarching and enduring patterns of value-conflict.45 “Sticking up for the little guy” is for example such a pattern. In doing so it seems like the host is always on the front-line of some ongoing conflict (hence the self-proclaimed title “culture warrior”).46
So according to Norton these kind of shows are not simply “dumbing down” the news in order to make it more attractive to distracted audiences, but rather produce a form of reductive simplicity that sharpens its significance.47 A show like The O’Reilly Factor is therefore less concerned with the plain facts of a particular news item, or as Norton argues: “it engages in a distinctive transposition of journalistic questions where why it matters becomes the dominant question, and what happened becomes a kind of set up for getting to the interpretive heart of these programs’ construction of the news”.48 However, this does not quite explain why major news networks would champion a specific political perspective. Fox News, for example, is considered to have an obvious conservative bias. A passionate quote from veteran news reporter Bonnie M. Anderson probably gives the most adequate description of the negative image that the channel has among critics:
[i]f the other networks decline into infotainment shows the lengths to which companies will go for larger profits, the Fox News Channel is the ideological poster child for what is wrong with American journalism. In fact, calling it a news channel or network is a misnomer. Run by Republican operative Roger Ailes it is the mouthpiece of the conservative right, the propaganda wing of the Republican Party; biased and dishonest, it reports news with a right-wing slant, ignores stories that challenge its point of view, and violates nearly every principle of good journalism.49
Fox News may very well be violating “every principle of good journalism”. Just like other networks, however it is just a money making entity. Again, it is Peabody Director Jeffery P. Jones has an interesting take on this. In a clever essay titled ‘The new news as no news: US 44 Ibid, 323.
45 Ibid, 325. 46 Ibid, 326. 47 Ibid, 343. 48 Ibid.
cable news channels as branded political entertainment television’ he argues that to assess the transformation of America’s televised news culture through the lens of journalism is a mistake.50 Jones claims that the sole desire of cable networks is to earn a profit, and that they use politics as a ‘brand image’ to set them apart from other networks. In other words, their perspective on politics has become their definite “style”. By translating politics into compelling social drama cable news not only attracts politically likeminded people, but actually craft viewership among the American public.51 Norton has already showed that prime time news analysis programs are perfectly capable of formulating a connection with the viewer, and there is a reason why he chose The O’Reilly Factor as a paradigm to base his argument on. Fox News has just been excellent in communicating conservative commentary to the American public. Jones argues in his essay that “[f]ox flatters its viewers by demonstrating their savvy in cutting through the lies of the ‘liberal media’ and socialist politicians’, and knowing what really constitutes reality, Fox has identified the enemy, and repeatedly tells the viewer that, together, viewer and network will be vigilant in addressing and countering the source.52 The fact that Fox has become such a dominant network, must mean that its “brand image” is simply more appealing than that of other networks, and thus more profitable as well.
All of this does not mean that America is full of gullible and ignorant people, who are letting themselves be fooled by the excesses cable news networks. In a small article for The New York Times Magazine, essayist Steve Almond confesses that he often watches “right-wing pundits spew hate”, to quench his thirst for moral superiority: “Rather than taking up the banner and the burden of the causes I believe in, or questioning my own consumptive habits, I’ve come to rely on private moments of indignation for moral vindication. I fume at the iniquity of Pundit A and laugh at the hypocrisy of Candidate B and feel absolved – without ever having left my couch. It’s a closed system of scorn and self-congratulation”. Liberal or conservative, in the end we all crave some form of entertainment and cable news networks have no problem supplying it.
2.4 Conclusion
Regardless as to why these major cable news networks may have chosen to take a 50 Jones, ‘The new news as no news’ in Media international Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 144 (2012) 147.
51 Ibid. 52 Ibid, 150.
conservative or liberal stance, there is a general belief (among scholars) that the traditional values of broadcast journalism are no longer upheld in America’s media landscape. The fact that the news is naturally intertwined with American politics, make it seem that not only this noble journalistic standard has deteriorated, but that democracy itself has been infiltrated by the entertainment industry and its ambiguous agenda. According to Baym, however, this also “created both the conditions and the need for the emergence of serious comedy as an increasingly legitimate and salient location for political discourse”.53 Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert catered to that need, and I believe that this effort is best to be understood as ‘The War on Bullshit’ (a phrase so eloquently provided by Trevor Noah in the introduction).
53 Baym, ‘Serious comedy’ in Laughing matters: humor and American politics in the Media Age (New York, Routledge, 2008) 30.
Chapter 3: Jon Stewart
3.1 Stewarts “Mission Statement”
“Bullshit is everywhere”, proclaimed Jon Stewart during his last appearance as host of The Daily Show. Before Bruce Springsteen sang this final episode to a close, Stewart turned to the camera and gave what perhaps can be described as a public service announcement about the workings of bullshit in everyday society. Apart from the white lies that “keep people from making each other cry all day”, Stewart urged his audience to beware of the more “premeditated, institutional bullshit, designed to obscure and distract”. In his speech Stewart talked about the different ways in which the American public is supposedly being deceived by “the bullshitocracy”. The controversial invocation of the Patriot Act was for example one of his main targets: “[m]aking bad things sound like good things. Patriot Act. Because ‘Are you scared enough to let me look at all of your phone records’ Act doesn’t’ sell. So whenever something’s been titled ‘Freedom,’ Family,’ ‘Fairness,’ ‘Health’, ‘America,’ take a good long sniff. Chances are it’s been manufactured in a facility that may contain traces of bullshit. With humorous bravado Stewart berated several other issues that illustrated the hypothetical power of “bullshit”, after which he ended his speech on a hopeful note: “But the good news is this; bullshitters have gotten pretty lazy, and their work is easily detected, and looking for it is kind of a pleasant way to pass the time, like an ‘I spy of bullshit’. So I say to you tonight, friends, the best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So, if you smell something, say something” (thereby parodying “the unofficial slogan of post-9/11 America”, that urged citizens to report possible terrorist activity).5455
Besides the fact that roughly 3.5 million viewers tuned in to see Stewart bid adieu to The Daily Show (earning the show’s second highest ratings ever), his parting message certainly struck a chord with several media outlets.56 The consensus of this being that Stewart’s final speech encapsulated what he always strove and stood for during his 16-year long tenure as host of the program. Neil Genzlinger from The New York Times even went as 54 ‘Uncensored – Three Different Kinds of Bullsh**t’, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, season 20, episode 142, Comedy Central (06-08-2015) http://www.cc.com/video-clips/ss6u07/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-uncensored---three-different-kinds-of-bulls--t (21-07-2017).
55 Hanson O’Haver, ‘How “if you see something, say something” became our national motto’, The New York Times (23-09-2016)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/23/how-if-you-see-something-say-something-became-our-national-motto/?utm_term=.04a9fc074b7c (21-07-2017).
56Brian Steinberg, Rick Kissell, ‘Jon Stewart’s Daily Show finale sets ratings records thanks to DVR playback’, Variety (07-08-2015) http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/ratings-jon-stewart-daily-show-finale-1201559242/ (21-07-2017).
far by stating that Stewart was “delivering a mission statement”, and that this sense of purpose is what made The Daily show stand out in comparison with shows such as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (1992-2014) and The Late Show with David Letterman (1993-2015): “[m]r. Stewart was after something more, and achieved it”.57 Merely the fact that Stewart’s Daily Show won more Primetime Emmy Awards than the shows of Leno and Letterman combined, could indicate how he outdid his former colleagues. However, the implication that Stewart “was after something more” remains somewhat vague. What is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart supposed to have achieved, apart from entertaining its audience? This chapter will show that Stewart took to late-night comedy like Bob Dylan took to music in the early 1960s. He entertained the masses with his particular brand of humor, which earned him the allure and grandeur of a folk hero who cunningly challenged the status quo in service of the truth. This put Stewart at the political forefront of the distracted center that grew increasingly dissatisfied with the Bush Administration and the compliant media. The problem with this being that Stewart, as a pedagogue of some sorts, was subjected to a form of idolization, and by analogy, supposedly heralded a new order in which the importance of comic benevolence surpasses the importance of media integrity.
3.2 Comedians on Bullshit
Jon Stewart was not the first comedian who told his audience to be wary of “bullshit”. The late George Carlin, one of America’s most important and influential stand-up comedians, often spoke of bullshit when addressing particular incongruities and contradictions within American society.58 In his tenth HBO special George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy (1997), he lamented on America’s conception of equality in a bit that closely resembled Stewart’s speech: [b]ullshit is everywhere. Bullshit is rampant. Parents are full of shit, teachers are full of shit, clergymen are full of shit, and law enforcement people are full of shit. The entire country is completely full of shit. In fact, this country was founded by a group of slave-owners who told us that all men are created equal. That is what’s known as being stunningly full of shit”.59 This was a theme that permeated most of Carlin’s material. During his 57 Neil Genzlinger, ‘Jon Stewart cements his legacy in Daily Show finale’, The New York Times (07-08-2015) http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/08/arts/television/jon-stewart-cements-his-legacy-in-daily-show-finale.html (21-07-2017).
58 Richard Zoglin, ‘How George Carlin changed comedy’, Time (23-07-2008). http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1817192,00.html (21-07-2017).
59 ‘George Carlin: Bullshit is Everywhere’, YouTube, uploaded by Green Momentum (30-05-2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL26qPG7Kaw (21-07-2016).
fourteenth and final HBO special It’s Bad for Ya! (2008), he comically professed that “bullshit” prohibited the American people from questioning authority, which is why especially children should be made aware of its existence: “[k]ids have to be warned that there’s bullshit coming down the road, That’s the biggest thing you can do for a kid. Tell them what life in this country is about. It’s about a whole lot of bullshit that needs to be detected and avoided. That’s the best thing you can do”.60 The working title for this show was The Parade of Useless Bullshit, and it clearly issues a similar warning as Stewart did during his last appearance as host of The Daily Show.61 The fact that there is a correlation between these performances is hardly a surprise. Stewart was not only a great admirer of Carlin, but he actually hosted what came to be known as Carlin’s 40th anniversary in entertainment.62 He definitely took notice in any case, as both comedians have eagerly stated that bullshit is a corrosive evil that is inexplicably intertwined with America’s culture.
The American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt offers a more theoretical understanding of “bullshit”. On March 14, 2005, he appeared on The Daily Show to talk about his book On bullshit (2005).63 According to Frankfurt, conveying bullshit is a deliberate form of misrepresentation or deception that people use when they are trying to get away with something.64 During his interview with Stewart, he explained that the difference between bullshit and lying is in a lack of concern for the truth.65 A liar needs to lead his audience away from the truth, or what he believes to be the truth, that is his main objective. As such, he shows a certain respect for the value and importance of truth.66 The “bullshitter” has a different agenda, and the question of whatever he says is true or false is irrelevant to his pursuit of that ambition.67 As Frankfurt elaborates in his book: “[w]hat he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensable distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to”.68 What the bullshitter says may 60 Idem.
61 James Sullivan, Seven dirty words: the life and crimes of George Carlin (Cambridge, Da Capo Press, 2010) 228.
62 ‘Jon Stewart Interviews George Carlin’, YouTube, uploaded by George Carlin Official YouTube Channel (16-08-2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCGGWeD_EJk (21-07-2017).
63 ‘Harry G. Frankfurt’, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, season 10, episode 35, Comedy Central (14-03-2005) http://www.cc.com/video-clips/zz9jnz/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-harry-g--frankfurt (21-07-2017). 64 Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2005) 23.
65‘Harry G. Frankfurt’, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, season 10, episode 35, Comedy Central (14-03-2005) http://www.cc.com/video-clips/zz9jnz/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-harry-g--frankfurt (21-07-2017).
66 Frankfurt, On Bullshit (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2005) 33.
67 ‘Harry Frankfurt On Bullshit’, Youtube, uploaded by Burchell Sensei (16-10-2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lArA7nMIqSI (21-07-2016).
thus very well be true, and he may not think that its false, he simply does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. Bullshit, according to Frankfurt, is therefore a more insidious threat to society.69 It is a form of social control that needs to be dealt with accordingly.
This might explain why Stewart has called Bill O’Reilly the mayor of “Bullshit Mountain”, during their famous debate held in the run-up to the 2012 U.S. presidential elections.70 O’Reilly had charged the Obama administration with creating a nation of dependents in his opening statement, which is why the government supposedly needed to cut its entitlement spending and stop giving handouts. According to Stewart, this kind of rhetoric is exactly what typifies “the psychosis of Bullshit Mountain”. He claimed that the Fox News icon helped to create an “alternate reality”, in which the problems of the American people are amplified and their solutions simplified. 71 Stewart thus vaguely employed Frankfurt’s notion of bullshit, by implying that O’Reilly (among the other denizens of “Bullshit Mountain”) is indifferent to the truth, which in this case could simply be the fact that a good portion of America was still recovering from the global financial crisis of 2008, as political commentator Robert Reich has pointed out many times (he also stated that O’Reilly and Fox News tend to bury the national dialogue in “doo-doo”).72 Stewart and Frankfurt have both indicated that vigilance could help one to circumvent or escape this alternative reality. However, it is hard to see when somebody has pulled the wool over your eyes.
3.3 “Teachers” on Bullshit
This was a conundrum that often appeared in the works of Neil Postman, who has written several significant books on education, language, culture, communication, media, and technology. His best known work is Amusing ourselves to death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), a polemic that in particular bemoans the impact of televised entertainment on America’s public discourse.73 As an advocate of education reform, Postman often sought to redesign the structure of the classroom. He wanted schoolteachers to focus 69 ‘Harry G. Frankfurt’, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, season 10, episode 35, Comedy Central (14-03-2005) http://www.cc.com/video-clips/zz9jnz/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-harry-g--frankfurt (21-07-2017). 70 Geoffrey Baym, ‘Stewart, O’Reilly, and The Rumble 2012: alternative political debate in the Age of Hybridity’ in Popular Communication 12 (2014) 85.
71 ‘The Rumble 2012 – Jon Stewart VS. Bill O’Reilly’, YouTube, uploaded by Hellfire8899 (10-04-2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPqXIfDYlZg&t=643s (06-07-2017).
72 Robert Reich, ‘Why anyone should care that Bill O’Reilly calls me a communist, Robert Reich (blog), (23-04-2012) http://robertreich.org/post/21670907549 (21-07-2017).
their work on helping students to understand themselves and their world trough critical thinking about language and other symbol systems that shape thought, culture, and human behavior.74 In a speech delivered at the National Convention for the Teacher of English (NTCE), on November 28, 1969, Postman called upon those teachers to help kids learn how to distinguish “useful talk” from “bullshit”. He claimed that this would be a most crucial skill for America’s youth to obtain: “[i] will ask only that you agree that every day in almost every way people are exposed to more bullshit than it is healthy for them to endure, and what if we can help them to recognize this fact, they might turn away from it and toward language that might do them some earthly good”. Amongst the reasons why one should have “a built-in, shock-proof, crap-detector” (a phrase that Postman admittedly stole from Ernest Hemingway), is the assumption that the development of mass media has facilitated a “decrease in available and viable ‘democratic’ channels of communication”. 75 This thought is central to Postman’s belief that impendent change or progress poses certain challenges within society, and that America’s educational system needs to create an environment in which young people can learn how to face those challenges.76
Together with Charles Weingartner (scholar of education), Postman consolidated this idea in Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969). According to Herb Karl, a longtime colleague of Weingartner, this manifesto was their way of helping the young make sense of the social anxieties that were created by the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, as “antiwar protests had caused an unprecedented tension between the generations; between the hawks and the doves; between those who chose to stay, those who chose to leave, and those who chose to turn on and drop out”.77 During this tumultuous time, American schools were hardly cultivating so called “experts at crap-detection”.78 According to Postman and Weingartner, students were left to fend for themselves because their teachers could not cope with the rapid advancement of television and technology. They were stuck in bygone era, so to speak. As such, those in power were supposedly free to implement their will on the people via mass media: “[t]he position has been elaborately developed in all media that ‘peaceniks’ are failing in the obligation to ‘support our boys overseas’. The effect of this process on all of us is to leave no alternative but to accept policy, act on orders from above, and implement the 74 Idem, 25.
75 https://criticalsnips.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/neil-postman-bullshit-and-the-art-of-crap-detection/ (21-07-2016).
76 Herb Karl, ‘Of questioning assumptions, crap detecting, and splinter of ice in the heart’ in The English Journal 94 (2004) 22.
77 idem.
policy without question or dialogue”.79 Postman and Weingartner thus try to argue that society takes a turn for the worse, when schoolteachers fail to arm their students against the “veneration of crap”.80 In their book they even nod at Hannah Arendt’s notion of ‘the banality of evil’, a concept that came into prominence following the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil (1963).81 This is not to say that they see a connection between Eichmann’s atrocities and the war in Vietnam (or the controversy that surrounds Arendt’s argument), but rather that both authors belief that a political system in which the media is free to breed misconception has the potential to strip its citizens from their ability to challenge the establishment or the cultural status quo, without them even knowing.82 Drawing from the work of Postman and Weingartner, one might argue that Stewart has been cultivating “experts at crap-detecting” his entire career, and that he arrived just in time to convey his comedy-laced lessons.83 When Stewart replaced Graig Kilborn as host of The Daily Show in 1999, he instigated an important change of focus that earned the program its prestige.84 First of all, he brought in Ben Karlin as the new head writer. They seemed to share an equal concern with “hypocrisy and the silly facades of politics”, and were fare more attentive to the many trends that came to define current news media practices than Kilborn and his team.85 This complementary duo was supported by a great cast of comedians, who were allowed to develop their own idiot-like characters. Among these ranks was not only Stephen Colbert, but also Steve Carrel, Nancy Walls and Lewis Black. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, as it was hence called, would mostly feature sharp and pointed humor about big and relevant news stories. Each episode Stewart would run down the day’s headlines using real news clips from mainstream media, and provide them with satirical and ironic commentary. Meanwhile, his correspondents (aka “The Best F#@king News Team Ever”) would tune in and give their absurd or humorously exaggerated takes on current events. An interview with a politician, writer, or actor would then usually conclude the show. According to media scholar Sophia A. McClennen and her undergraduate collaborator Remy M. Maisel 79 Idem.
80 https://criticalsnips.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/neil-postman-bullshit-and-the-art-of-crap-detection/ (06-12-2016).
81 Postman, Weingartner, Teaching as a subversive activity (New York, Delacorte Press, 1969) 19. 82 Idem.
83 James Fredal, ‘Rhetoric and bullshit’ in National Council of Teachers of English 73 (2011) 251.
84 Jeffrey P. Jones, Entertaining politics: satiric television and political engagement (New York, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2010) 94.
85 Chris Smit, ‘How Jon Stewart took over The Daily Show and revolutionized late-night TV: an oral history’, Vanity Fair (December 2016) http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/11/how-jon-stewart-took-over-the-daily-show-late-night-tv (21-07-2016).
in Is satire saving our nation? –mockery and American politics (2014), this was a significant change of pace, as “[t]he show shifted to a more biting and politically motivated form of satire while continuing to work on excellent writing that could pop the entertainment value of the program”. 86 Instead of “creating funny spoof headlines”, Stewart and his colleagues delved into complicated news stories, and focused on the particular way these stories were portrayed by cable news networks.87
3.4 Stewart: The Anointed Jester
Stewart started to focus more on politics during the presidential elections of 2000. George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore through a lengthy recount and a controversial Supreme Court Verdict was one of the most disputed election outcomes in American history. It also proved to be comedy gold for The Daily Show. Under the auspices of ‘Comedy Central’s Indecision 2000’, Stewart and his staff humorously emphasized the absurdity that surrounded the entire electoral process (for which they were awarded the prestigious Peabody Award in 2001).88 According to Time Magazine, this is what set the stage for The Daily Show’s permanent place in the heart of the American political conversation.89 Media scholar Jeffrey P. Jones definitely agrees with that statement, as he explains in Entertaining Politics: “Stewart and The Daily Show nevertheless emerged from the 2000 presidential election with an air of respectability from a bewildered and punch drunk audience who found that the court jester in the corner was making more sense than the traditional institutional voices that typically command center stage and interpretive authority on television”.90 Stewart supposedly sustained this role throughout the early years of the Bush administration, which were troubling times to say the least. After the September 11 attacks, the U.S. launched Operation Enduring Freedom, which was followed by the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. Jones believes, as do many scholars, that the corporate news media abetted the Bush administration to create policy and promote their agenda, through weak reporting “and tendency toward patriotic spectacle”.91 He thus 86 Sophia A. McClennen, Remy M. Maisel, Is satire saving our nation? -mockery and American Politics (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 82.
87 Smit, ‘How Jon Stewart took over The Daily Show and revolutionized late-night TV’, Vanity Fair (December 2016) http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/11/how-jon-stewart-took-over-the-daily-show-late-night-tv (21-07-2016).
88 ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Indecision 2000’, http://www.peabodyawards.com/award-profile/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-indecision-2000 (08-12-2016).
89 http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2028143_2028152_2028140,00.html (08-12-2016).
90 Jones, Entertaining politics (New York, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2010) 95. 91 Idem, 98.
utters the same grievances as Postman and Weingartner did in 1969, but luckily for Jones, “court jester” Stewart was there to “poke, prod, and critique King George and his administration’s brazen and ruthless yet incompetently waged War on Terror”.92
The Daily Show had satirized the media’s treatment of America’s war efforts in the Middle East almost nonstop.93 Segments such as ‘Operation Enduring Coverage’, ‘America Freaks Out’, and ‘Mess O’ Potamia’, often accentuated the hysterical tenor of sensational news stories or the self-indulgence of war correspondents like Geraldo Rivera, who according to Jones was “rummaging through the caves of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, with a pistol on his hip as he sought to hunt down Osama bin Laden himself!”.94 This kind of material was sometimes only in need of a simple punchline (“The four most dreaded words in journalism: Geraldo’s got a gun”), but Stewart and his writers also proved to be quite thorough researchers.95 One of the most memorable moments of the show was in April 2003, when Stewart “moderated” a mock debate in which President Bush squared off against himself.96 A clever juxtaposition of soundbites, including footage of comments that Bush made on national television in 2000 and 2003, showed that the President’s previous statement were totally at odds with his current stance on the issue of nation building in Iraq.97 Finding clips in which politicians or pundits rebutted their “future selves” became one of the show’s strong suits. Philosopher Judith Barad argues in ‘Stewart and Socrates: speaking truth to power’ (2013), that this kind of humor earned Stewart a large group of young followers who, like the students of Socrates, adapted a critical attitude towards the government.98 The show’s audience had more than tripled to a peak of over a million viewers a night in 2004. Many of these viewers were news consumers who proved to be younger and better informed than those of regular cable news shows.99 The Daily Show won the TCA award for Outstanding Achievement in News and Information that very same year, after which Stewart found himself on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine where he was hailed as the “most trusted name in news”.100
92 Idem, 11.
93 Tad Friend, ‘Is it funny yet? Jon Stewart and the comedy of crisis’ in The New Yorker 77 (2002) 28. 94 Jones, Entertaining politics (New York, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2010) 98.
95 Friend, ‘Is it funny yet?’ in The New Yorker 77 (2002) 28.
96‘Bush V. Bush’, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, season 9, episode 55, Comedy Central (28-04-2003) http://www.cc.com/video-clips/3e83yu/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-bush-v--bush (21-07-2017). 97 Idem.
98 Judith Barad, ‘Stewart and Socrates: speaking truth to power’ in The Ultimate Daily Show and Philosophy: more Moments of Zen, more indecision theory (Malden, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) 109.
99 John Colapinto, ‘The most trusted name in news’, Rolling Stone Magazine (28-10-2004) http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-most-trusted-name-in-news-20041028 (21-07-2017). 100 Idem.
The fact that The Daily Show’s comedic interpretation of news and politics provided a spectrum of critical analyses for its younger audience is beyond question. A comedian like Stewart would in this case be equally capable of creating an environment that allows people to comprehend their cultural surroundings and rise above them when necessary, as a schoolteacher does according to Postman.101 However, Stewart provided more than insight. He provided comedy as well, hence the “jester-analogy”. The figure of the jester has often been invoked to describe Jon Stewart, especially by his biggest supporters.102 When former Vice President Al Gore came on the show to discuss his new book The assault on reason (2007), he dubbed Stewart the equivalent of a medieval court jester and said that one needed to watch The Daily Show to “get to the heart of what the most important news of the day is”.103 The same goes for Brian Dunphy, a professor at Brooklyn College, who visited several Dutch universities in October 2012, to lecture about The Daily Show.104 He claims that Stewart’s satirical critique of the corporate news media held “those in power” accountable to the truth: “like the jester mocking the monarchy to their face, Benjamin Franklin sitting down the wrongs of the English Crown which lead to revolution, or the works of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury and others questioning our elected leaders by elevating our national conversation, educating the masses and making us laugh in the interim”.105 In his lectures entitled America’s Jester: The Daily Show with John Stewart, Dunphy basically argues that Stewart’s program became an established institute that provided honest social commentary.
3.5 Stewart in Crossfire
The jester figure is thus used to denote Stewart’s “pivotal role” within society, and apparently this jester showed his true colors when he appeared on CNN’s Crossfire in October 2004. Stewart was invited by co-hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala to promote his book America (the book): a citizen’s guide to democracy inaction (2004). Instead he delved into a 101 Postman, Weingartner, Teaching as a subversive activity (New York, Delacorte Press, 1969) 23.
102 Joanne Morreale, ‘Jon Stewart and The Daily Show: I thought you were going to be funny!’ in Satire TV: politics and comedy in the post-network era (New York, New York University Press, 2009) 115.
103 ‘Al Gore Part 2.’, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, season 12, episode 73, Comedy Central (24-05-2007) http://www.cc.com/video-clips/s2x9a2/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-al-gore-pt--2 (21-07-2017).
104Anna van den Breemer, ‘Het Jon Stewart-effect: Amerikaanse hofnar bepaalt het politieke debat’, de Volkskrant (07-10-2012) http://www.volkskrant.nl/buitenland/het-jon-stewart-effect-amerikaanse-hofnar-bepaalt-het-politieke-debat~a3327893/ (21-07-2017).
105 ‘America’s Jester: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’, YouTube, uploaded by StudGenGroningen (16-04-2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0QeNGzBC3k&t=3861s (21-07-2017).
12-minute long critique of the show’s format and the style of arguments it presented. Crossfire was intended as a forum for political debate. With Begala “on the left”, and Carlson “on the right”, it supposedly provided reasonable arguments from both sides of the political spectrum. Stewart, however, said that the program was doing theater instead of debate, and that its hosts were in fact “partisan hacks” who reduced news coverage and important issues to a number of superficial talking point, only meant to befit an extreme liberal or conservative outlook.106 In his opinion, they were “hurting America” by not fulfilling their responsibility to the public discourse: “See, the thing is, we need your help. Right now, you’re helping the politicians and the corporations. And we’re left out there to mow our lawns”.107 CNN canceled Crossfire two months later. The network’s president stated that this decision partially rested on Stewart’s overall premise of the program, but regardless of whether the comedian drove Crossfire off the air, his appearance on the show became extremely popular.108 Even Harry G. Frankfurt had a say about the whole affair. When he was a guest on The Alcove with Mark Molaro, a relatively unknown online interview series, the Princeton professor was asked to reflect on the effectiveness of satirical comedy.109 To which he replied, that it could possibly reduce the amount of bullshit in public discourse: “[o]ne way of combating bullshitters, is as I say, to try to humiliate them by laughing at them and getting other people to laugh at them, to show that we don’t take them seriously”.110 Frankfurt only believed that there was no real data to support this claim, except for Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire. However, this was not exactly a comedic performance. It was just an interview that got out of hand (as Stewart himself would later describe it), but Jones, Gore, and Dunphy perceive the Crossfire altercation to be the moment when their court jester revealed the subtext of his satirical routine on The Daily Show.
They find a kindred spirit in social media researcher Megan Boler. She argues that “the popular appeal of the Crossfire moment lies in the perception of Stewart’s courage to speak the truth, to confront politician’s lies and MSM (mainstream media sources) spin with
106 Megan Boler, ‘The Daily Show and Crossfire: satire and sincerity as truth to power’ in Digital media and democracy: tactics in hard times (Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2008) 394.
107 ‘Jon Stewart on Crossfire’, YouTube, uploaded by Alex Felker (16-04-2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE&t=265s (21-07-2017).
108 Jeremy Egner, Dave Itzkoff, Kathryn Shattuck, ‘Jon Stewart and The Daily Show: 9 essential moments’ in The New York Times (04-08-2015) http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/04/arts/television/jon-stewart-daily-show-9-essential-moments.html (08-12-2016).
109 ‘Harry Frankfurt talks about Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert’, YouTube, uploaded by MarkMolaro (18-05-2007) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-7IW8CxgXY (21-07-2017).
an antidote of honesty”.111 With the help of Stephen Turpin, Boler combed the internet to make an assessment of the “blogosphere”, and found that many Daily Show fans shared her belief: “The frustration expressed by Stewart clearly resonated with the sentiments of thousands of viewers who were keenly grateful that Jon Stewart had the status and authority to represent the ‘average citizen’ and broadcast their views”.112 However, her efforts to prove that Stewart acted as a surrogate for the people only reveals that the Crossfire altercation is so popular because, in a brief moment, the public caught their favorite comedian quite literally skewering the media cohorts of both political parties (arguably with effect).
Stewart’s famous interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, the host of Mad Money (a financial news show with an entertainment-style format). In early March 2009, The Daily Show began to criticize Cramer’s program, and the network that airs it, for their misleading coverage during the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Stewart humorously showed clips of Cramer encouraging his viewers to buy a particular stock just days before it collapsed. The financial pundit, in turn, publicly defended his show by claiming that Stewart’s criticism was unjustified. This eventually led to a highly anticipated face-to-face confrontation on The Daily Show. Just as he had done with the hosts of Crossfire, Stewart lambasted his guest for not correctly informing the American public: “[i] understand you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a fucking game”. According to television critic Emily Nussbaum, the comedian “nailed Cramer on his manipulations, airing clip after damning clip, and shouting ‘Roll 212!’ with prosecutorial glee”. While the interview earned The Daily Show 2.3 million viewers, it caused a public relations disaster for CNBC. Meanwhile, other networks milked the moment for all its worth. Fox News, for instance, replayed segments of the interview under the heading of “Breaking News: Jon Stewart exposes CNBC’s Jim Cramer as 2 faced business con” (which is somewhat ironic because Fox News has provided endless fodder for The Daily Show). Talking to Howard Stern in 2014, he expressed regret about the whole situation: “[y]ou begin to believe your own responsibility to ‘get this guy’ – even though that’s complete bullshit”.
The Crossfire interview and “the Cramer takedown” were smoking guns that enabled “the public” to force a badge of honor upon the host of The Daily Show: “Stewart as court jester represents the contemporary form of political satire that speaks truth to power’.113 This old Quaker slogan is an activist stamp ascribed to those comedians who successfully use 111 Boler, ‘The Daily Show and Crossfire’ in Digital media and democracy (Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2008) 408.
112 Idem, 399. 113 Idem, 385.
