Jon Stewart And The Age Of Hyper-Partisan Media
How Stewart's Daily Show Walked, So Tucker Carlson Could Run
One Jon Stewart metaphor has stuck with me more than any other piece of content he's produced. Even more than his prestigious film career and string of hit shows beyond The Daily Show - who could forget that important movie he quit the show to make? One so successful I don't even have to name it, such is its ubiquity.
His metaphor is pretty crass, in a way I appreciate, it also perfectly sums up his contribution to the demise of journalism - First in quality, then in trust.
During a 2004 Q&A session at C-SPAN, hosted by the now disgraced interviewer Charlie Rose, in a room filled largely with working journalists, Stewart heckled the crowd for what he saw as a lack of moral conviction.
“When you go to the zoo and you see a monkey throwing poop, you go, "that's what monkeys do, what are you gonna do?" But what I wish the media would do more frequently is say "bad monkey."”
Context matters, and the context for this quote is the era of reporters embedded with US soldiers in Bush’s multiple wars. In that context, his call for a more moralistic media had a bit of a point.
Immediate context can also be very misleading When latched onto solely, it can create an entirely false perspective on the world. Recency bias, as it's more succinctly known.
Before Stewart took over, The Daily Show was basically a ‘news fails’ account in the pre-social media age. Stewart’s Daily Show was more lecturing. It was critical of the news industry; for not being brave enough to ‘speak truth to power’, and for being full of shows (like CNN’s Crossfire, more on that later) which only showed two fairly predictable partisan perspectives.
How did they dodge the same criticism? By framing themselves as ‘just a comedy show’ and therefore above any journalistic standards.
Sure, they had politicians on the show. Yes, they were showing a very partisan view of the world. But you couldn't expect better from them, as Stewart said repeatedly - "no one should look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity."
What Stewart - a professional comedian whose closest connection to politics was his friend and ex-roommate former Congressman (and registered sex offender) Anthony Weiner - failed to grasp was that a journalism based on telling people off instead of reporting facts would be disastrous in the long run. It might scratch an immediate itch for righteousness, but it would be setting a dangerous precedent.
And so it has proven.
What started as a naive call to get journalists to be more explicit with their audience about how they feel about the world, gave rise to a comfort with partisanship in media, within said media, and that eroded public trust in the objectivity of the media.
Nothing sums this up more perfectly than the case of CNN’s bland panel show, Crossfire.
Stewart’s performance on Crossfire, where he heckled the hosts and questioned the show's journalistic merit, resulted in the show's cancellation. In a literal sense, not the vague kind popular today. This freed up co-host Tucker Carlson to move over to a network where he wouldn't be tethered to the politics of respectability. Fox News.
His attacks on Fox News host Bill O´Reilly were a similar blessing for the network. It gave them the same kind of outsider edge that Stewart had formulated. The plain-talk, say-it-how-it-is persona Stewart had built on the anti-authoritarian left, they built amongst their audience on the pro-authoritarian right.
It ended up helping both sides by providing them with clear examples of partisanship they could use to rark-up their audiences. In a five month period, The Daily Show had 24 different segments on Fox News alone. Fox also had their villain, an admitted Democrat who highlighted them as "everything wrong", something their audience loved to hear. The ‘deplorables’ of the time.
The Daily Show was wildly popular at its height, but its fall - and the lack of success of its many spin offs - was stark.
Its young target demographic and trendiness ensured its message spread far and wide, but also meant it faced a ticking clock. While its narrative that mainstream news outlets were gutless inspired once aspiring journalists to skip J-School and its high minded ‘reporting’, the show also relied on them for stories to criticise.
The Daily Show lost its relevance because the new 18-34 year olds had only ever known "bad monkey." There is no Mediawatch without a media to watch, and so it ceased to be relevant.
It's a legacy act. A relic of a bygone era. Like rock bands are today. Even Stewart returning as host has not been enough to revive it.
Stewart, like Dick Nixon and Tipper Gore, was ultimately detrimental to his own cause due to his hectoring tone and lack of wider cultural insight. The positive legacy of all three are dwarfed by the more long lasting and influential opposition they inspired.
No, Stewart didn't invent the hyper-partisan culture we’re faced with today - the Internet and its anonymity has had a far bigger influence on that - but it made it cool amongst a generation of Millenials and Gen Xers to ignore mainstream news outlets. To rely on the likes of comedians for their truth - Joe Rogan owes him several free rounds of ayahuasca.
It created a great deal of resentment amongst people who didn't agree with its worldview, a counter-swing that would have created Fox News if it didn't already exist at the time. That, more than the Network inspired rants or the snark, is the legacy of Stewart’s The Daily Show.
Back to the Zoo. To update the metaphor for 2024 - the monkeys are still throwing poop, shit is still flying, but now people only come to the Zoo to say "bad monkey." The Zoo only exists to give people a feeling of self-righteousness, every other exhibit is abandoned.
Zoos, and we as its patrons, are poorer for it.
Another biased article. Sure he has his faults. But he's exposing issues on which the media has been weak and ineffectual. Credit where credit is due.