Jon Stewart, Fox News, And The Media.
So the other day I caught most of Jon Stewart’s interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday and thought I’d give my take on the appearance and Stewart in general. Interestingly, watching the show I thought Stewart demolished and outclassed Wallace, a tough and thorough interviewer, but as I went back and read the transcript before writing this post I found that Stewart’s words, when stripped of his charismatic persona, seem to ring a little hollower now than at the time, though Stewart in all media comes off as an intelligent and impressive man.
Wallace, it seems has taken exception to Stewart relentlessly mocking Fox news as a “right-wing propaganda outfit” and sees Stewart as another Hollywood liberal making his living by not just satirizing the right but by pushing a consciously leftist agenda which Stewart finds laughably wrong. But in truth both Stewart and Wallace have a distorted view of each other (or rather Stewart has a distorted view of Fox and Wallace of Stewart).
According to Stewart, Fox is simply a mouth piece for “right-wing activism” doubling as a legitimate news source. It’s simply the unofficial organ of the Conservative Movement despite the way that Fox News personalities and executives insist the network is “fair and balanced”. And Stewart is right, up to a point. Fox News is a conservative network. In terms of the political views of it’s on-air talent, the tone of it’s shows, and the commentary it is a right of center news organization. But Stewart rejects the idea that major traditional news outfits, such as the New York Times, CBS, ABC, CNN etc. etc. etc. are biased to the left. Instead, he claims the mainstream media is biased towards “sensationalism and laziness” which again, is correct to a certain point. The mainstream media will always be biased towards the easy narrative, towards the simple if not correct arguments, will make the facts fit the story.
Trouble is none of this is really new, for one. And for another Stewart misses some of the context and implications of the media world. News Organizations have always been political, in times passed nakedly so (ever notice newspapers that have the word “Democrat” or “Republican” in their names?). There is no such thing as a totally impartial news organization in the same way there is no such thing as a totally unbiased person. The biases, prejudices, and points of view are simply an inescapable part of human life.
So where exactly does Fox News fit in the pantheon of the American Media, what distinguishes Fox from other outfits. Well first of al,l since the inception of the network, it has focused on being a bit more tabloidy and personality driven. Leggy blonde newscasters, California police car chases, and loud mouth conservative Irish cranks are it’s bread and butter. It’s the Married With Children to CNN’s The Cosby Show. Second it has consciously tried to attract conservative viewers by featuring conservative opinion shows.
But this hardly makes it a propaganda organ for the Right. In fact, considering that America is a slightly right-of-centre country the tone of Fox, if not the actual content seems to me at least to be about the right for the average American, that is somewhat to the right in outlook. Fox’s ratings bear this out. Every one of those people watchingFox’s nightly programming isn’t a foaming at the mouth righty.
As for the actual programming if one were to ignore Glenn Beck, who is quitting the network in a few days anyway, Sean Hannity, who is horribly boring without his old partner Colmes to spar with, and Bill O’reilly, whose Long Island brand of right-wing populism is endearing if not ill-informed, the most conservative daily programme would be Fox and Friends, the network’s morning squawk-fest of inane chatter and uninteresting guests. Roger Ailes, Fox’s chief’s original sin, it would seem is allowing conservative commentators to dominate the network’s prime time opinion block, at least that’s what I get from Jon Stewart’s critique.
Fox is undoubtedly right wing in that the majority of it’s opinion shows feature right wingers and a large proportion of it’s on-air talent are conservative. Incidentally, this may simply demonstrate a self selection bias where conservative reporters and talent drift towards Fox and liberal talent drift towards MSNBC and elsewhere. Stewart points to MSNBC as being the left wing version of Fox, which indeed was a strategy MSNBC pursued, to feature unabashedly ideological opinion news and salacious reportage but there simply aren’t as many consumers of left wing political commentary as there are of right wing commentary.
Stewart sees Fox News as a rightist propaganda machine yet ironically enough, Wallace sees Stewart as serving virtually the same function for the left, being a comedic political attack dog. If Fox pushes a conservative agenda then Stewart and the mainstream media pursuea liberal one, atleast in each other’s eyes.
But Wallace is wrong about Stewart. The mainstream media is undoubtedly biased institutionally in the same way that Fox is biased institutionally; that is it’s dominated by people of a left wing persuasion and therefore tends to produce content with a leftist tone. But mainstream media outlets are also biased because their very journalistic philosophy and tradition of journalistic standards is deeply in the politics of the middle 20th Century, a time of left wing political domination. Every network news outfit can trace it’s origins to the days of Walter Cronkite, when the nightly news was the ultimate arbiter of truth and fact, when anything that came out of an anchor’s mouth was the way it is. Likewise the nation’s “paper of record” the New York Times has always been seen by the people who run it as being something akin to the voice of God.
The mainstream media isn’t liberal just because most of the major players within it are liberal. It’s liberal because media outlets seek to impose their narrative versions of reality as absolute truth, a goal increasingly frustrated since the rise of new media over the past few decades. What the CBS Evening News and the New York Times push isn’t ideological liberalism per se, but simply their own cultural and political authority which, due to historical and cultural reasons happens to be fairly liberal. But that very project of creating a monopoly on information is, sui generis a fundamentally leftist project.
Also Stewart is totally correct that the mainstream media is biased towards sensationalism and laziness. But that’s has always been true of all media and indeed all popular culture for as long as it has existed. Jon Stewart seems to think that once upon a time the media was dominated by high-principled muck-raking journalists dedicated to civic virtue and exposing corruption rather than a pack of careerist, hacks, and flunkies. In other words Stewart sort of buys in to the idea that once upon a time the Grey Lady and the nightly news really were the voice of God and he laments that the days of Walter Cronkite declaring wars unwinnable with absolute finality and righteousness are over.
When Chris Wallace says that he thinks Jon Stewart’s motivation is to become a political player he is dead wrong. His fundamental misunderstanding of Stewart is what allows Stewart to so effectively out manoeuvre him. Stewart claims to be at his best a figure like Mark Twain, a satirist first, but one who’s comedy is informed by a certain ideology, a conduit for social commentary that provokes whatever political debates as it will. Stewart simply makes fun of the ridiculousness of the system and leaves it to the system to fix itself. But in this description of how Stewart views himself it’s easy to see his real motivations and aspirations.
First and foremost Stewart is an egoist. Like all true egoists he clothes himself in a veneer of self deprecation. But it’s easy to see, particularly in this interview the arrogance with which Stewart carries himself. The insulting way he dismissed Wallace as essentially being a token newsman to cover for Roger Ailes’spropaganda machine was shockingly arrogant and his conception of himself as being a sort of Shakespearean fool, a wise-cracking clown who can speak truth to power and deftly get away with saying what we are all thinking demonstrates just how highly Stewart thinks of himself.
It’s also worth noting that Stewart pretty sharply complains that being a newsman is easy compared to being a comedian. But that’s not so, in fact that’s comparing apples and oranges. It takes talent to be a comedian, and Jon Stewart undoubtedly is very talented. All the hard work and preparation in the world simply will not make an unfunny person be funny. It is in fact very easy for someone like Jon Stewart to do what he does precisely because he has talent. But to be a newsman, quite literally requires no talent at all. What it requires is intelligence and a wide breadth of knowledge. And there Jon Stewart comes up short. While undoubtedly a clever guy and one who seems direct and honest Jon Stewart isn’t exactly a filosophe.
But the second key to understanding Stewart is that, contra Wallace, Stewart has absolutely no desire for political power. Stewart does not want to be Frank Sinatra, hob-knobbing with the Kennedys. No, Stewart’s hunger is for cultural power our relevance and his guiding light, like every TV comedian is Johnny Carson. Stewart lusts after that same kind of cultural relevance that Johnny Carson had for over three decades, the ability to have millions of people to laugh at your jokes and witticisms every night, to repeat them to each other the next day. In a way this is an even more ambitious aspiration than mere political power.
And it is this that is Stewart’s driving force which also explains the political nature of his comedy. The cutting edge of popular culture is on the left, and not just the whole of the left but in a particular kind of leftism, that is the sort of leftist political cynicism that can be readily found in most college dorms. In other words Jon Stewart’s key target demographic. Jon Stewart’s appeal is basically to be relevant to each new cohort of College Sophomores every year. If young, hip, college students were a particularly conservative lot Jon Stewart would no doubt be ridiculing president Obama with the kind of gusto he reserves for Sarah Palin.
But let’s be clear, Stewart still is a man of politics, case in point his interview with John Yoo a couple years back. This was actually quite a remarkable interview for a couple reasons. A little bit of background: John Yoo was the White House lawyer tasked with developing the legal framework for the Bush Administration’s “enhanced interrogation techniques”. To the Left he was the man who crafted a legal cover for the Bush Administration to torture prisoners. A somewhat less heated way to think about Yoo’s roll was that he was given the task of defining legally what torture is and is not. This is akin to the distinction between insanity and legal insanity. There are plenty of criminals who are insane but only so many of those are insane in the eyes of the law. Likewise there are plenty of unpleasant things you can do to someone that your or I might call torture but only certain things in the eyes of the law that are torture. Yoo’s job was to delineate where the colloquial definition of torture was superseded by the legal definition.
Now Yoo has been thoroughly vilified by the left but he is obviously a very smart man and probably fairly experienced at defending himself (he’s a constitutional law professor at Berkley) so he certainly knew what he was walking in to. Indeed he walked on stage to noticably muted applause and he certainly knew that Jon Stewart was going to come after him, and come after him he did, but the interview did not go how Stewart had planned.
What followed was 45 minutes of John Yoo patiently and amiably explaining to Jon Stewart his roll in interpreting the legality of “enhanced interrogation” while a clearly flummoxed Stewart could only sputter helplessly. It is no-coincidence that this was possibly the unfunniest interview I’ve ever seen Stewart conduct. It was all tension as a clearly outmatched Stewart tried desperately to land a punch on the serene and smiling Yoo.
But even more remarkable than the interview itself was that the next day Stewart actually apologized to his audience for being so thoroughly outmaneuvered by Yoo. Stewart openly said that he intended to nail Yoo for the criminal he was and expose this architect of the American Gulag but simply was unable to get the job done.
So much for Stewart being a comedian first.
The run down on Jon Stewart is this: Stewart is a liberal guy who recognizes that political comedy and especially leftwing political comedy is the secret to remaining a prominent cultural figure. He is a brilliant satirist and generally funny but he’s also a one trick pony. Fortunately his one trick (using comedy to humiliate the Right) is much in demand with left wing collegians who are essentially the center of modern popular culture.
Often critics will point out that over the years Stewart, a self-described “fake newsman” is seen more and more as a legitimate source of news and information. Stewart tends to respond to this by accusing the accuser, by claiming that it it the failure of the news media and the political classes that have driven people away to the point that they trust a fake newsman more than the “real newsmen”. His appearance on CNN’ Crossfire a few years ago and his heated duel with Tucker Carlson is a notable example of this. But the fact of the matter is the news and politics has always been a mud fight. Two hundred years ago newspapers would run stories on rival politicians calling each other’s wives “harlots” or whatever. Politics is a dirty business and, frankly, that’s the way people like it. That’sthe fun of it and we expect it, we expect the lies, and bullshit, and name calling, and scoring of political points. We expect the salaciousness and breathless reporting. Tha’s how we are, for good or ill.
The truth of the matter is that Jon Stewart does have real political power. Jon Stewart does exactly the same thing that Rush Limbaugh does every day only Stewart is considerably funnier. He entertains people through making political points and all his political points and jokes are made in just one direction (occasionally Stewart will engage in gentle criticism of Democrats, either from the left, or on non-ideological ground). What’s the difference between taking tough, principalled political disagreements over important and somewhat opaque issues and making a joke out of them and taking those same disagreements and turning it into a talking point for Sean Hannity? To be fair that is exactly Stewart’s indictment of Fox News, that it turns politics into comedy and that this lowering nof the standards of national debate to that level is bad. But at the same time Stewart doesn’t seem to mind his own rise to political prominence. The difference between Jon Stewart and Hannity is that Stewart claims he is a clown and no one believes him where as Hannity claims he is a serious journalist and no one believes him.
Stewart, for better or worse is a political player and thus can be legitimately challenged on political grounds. He might say that is ridiculous, that it’s insane to argue over something like: that he got his facts wrong on some political joke he made, but you know what, when your comedy becomes so political that people feel the need to start fact checking, it’s time to reexamine your own routine.
There’s plenty more to be said about this interview and about the changing world of the media, about Jon Stewart and Fox News. But that will have to be said by others because I’ve spent enough time typing for one night. I will add that it was a very interesting interview and that I have a lot of respect for both Chris Wallace as a journalist and interviewer and for Jon Stewart as a comedian and that the world is large enough for them to both coexist in harmony. But a little soul searching on the part of both would probably help them understand the views of the other.
