Jon Stewart gave us the era of Obama. As that era of bad faith comes to a close, so does his own An Era of Bad Faith Ends By Daniel Greenfield February 13, 2015 Comments| Print friendly | Subscribe | Email Us | Generation Xers mourning Stewart’s departure ought to be thanking the man who made the awkward comedian’s long tenure of pulling faces while making snide remarks possible; President Bush. George W. Bush made Jon Stewart. Even Stewart has admitted that his show came into its own when Bush did. A world in which a President Gore spent eight years sonorously lecturing Americans about his love for the trees is also a world in which Jon Stewart would be out there doing pizza commercials. It was Bush’s victory that took a flailing cable show hosted by an irritating little standup comedian with more neurotic tics than a flea-bitten Woody Allen and turned him into the voice of liberalism. Stewart’s nervous smirk and his passive aggressive mockery became the zeitgeist of urban Democrats nervously responding to Bush’s popularity and the rise of American patriotism after September 11. The Democratic Party was out of ideas. The politicians who would become some of Bush’s most fevered critics were still following the president’s cues. A newly serious America was confronting a world war. Stewart’s disingenuousness, veering from ironic detachment to self-righteous hectoring, undermined real sincerity with fake sincerity. The Daily Show’s audience of hipster yuppies cheered their newfound faith in sincere cynicism while the calculated ironic distance of his comedy kept him safe from critics. Even while he attacked the media’s dishonesty, his own routine was the most dishonest of them all. His fake news was real news, biased and spun with punch lines. It was fake news that was real and just as fake as the rest of the news. The truth was that the lie was still a lie. What Stewart offered a party dragged down by a morose Gore and Kerry was the promise of cool. Their former figurehead had started out playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show only to decay into a bloated red-faced mess. With towers burning and wars rising, Stewart was to be their bridge to a cooler and younger 21st century that an aging Democratic Party no longer seemed able to grapple with. Jon Stewart didn’t actually have cool, but he could offer it up inversely by way of mockery. Like a school paper’s drama critic, he might not be cool, but by railing against others, he could deny coolness to them. Stewart wasn’t funny and knew little about politics. Unqualified to be in politics, journalism or even comedy, he straddled the line by casting himself as a critic of the media and politics. In his new role, he just had to be funny by the standards of politics and politically knowledge by the standard of comedians. It was a low bar that he just managed to limbo under. All he had to was to go after the right targets. Audiences in retro glasses clapped like electroshocked seals at his every grimace and the media declared that his fake news was what real news should be. And worst of all, they meant it. The media found Stewart refreshing not because he kept them honest, but because he encouraged their worst partisan instincts for dishonesty. The news anchors at their desks wished that they could say the things that he said. And some of them began to say them. Today the line has blurred so much that NBC News was thinking of offering Stewart a gig on Meet the Press. While Bush may have made Stewart, Jon Stewart then made Obama. Barack Obama was a political version of Jon Stewart; a dishonest entertainer turning politics into a joke and then faking a theatrical sincerity while throwing out every possible distraction to cover up his dishonesty and bad faith. Stewart provided a counterpoint to Bush’s real sincerity with fake sincerity. It was a joke that Stephen Colbert would polish into a single mindless routine. The flip side of the routine was that flippancy equaled sincerity. If the sincerity of patriotism and the devoutness of faith were a joke, then anyone who was joking was bound to be sincere. Those were the clown shoes to be filled by hope and change. Obama’s fake self-awareness made him seem authentic in a social media society composed of reflective levels of personality. Obama’s fake self-awareness made him seem authentic in a social media society composed of reflective levels of personality. What Stewart offered Democrats was an evasive viewpoint without accountability. And nothing quite appeals to the cowardly instincts of a political hack like being able to take a political position without being held accountable for it. But it was Obama who truly embraced politics without accountability, transforming every issue into a joke or referencing it back to his own biography. While he may have come out on the stage with a unique personal story, what kept Obama competitive was his skill at refracting everything through layers of irony and self-awareness. His approach was to borrow Stewart’s own routine without any of its ambiguity. Stewart’s pretense of triangulation became Obama’s obsession with turning his radical left-wing politics into an imaginary middle ground. Stewart and Obama had come out of a political movement trying to respond to September 11 without having the first idea how to do so. Stewart’s comedy paved the way for minimizing the threat while inflating the absurdity of those trying to fight it. It is an approach that Obama continues to embrace. Both men have pretended that they aren’t ideologues. They have acted as if the left is a third way, rather than the same old way, selling that dishonest message through style, not substance. Jon Stewart did not offer an alternative to the media. He was what the media was becoming. The merging of opinion and reporting along with the overlay of cynical humor over every story have become ubiquitous. Stewart didn’t pave the way for a better media. He paved the way for Buzzfeed, Vice, Politico and Vox. He turned the news into a joke with an agenda… which is exactly what it is now. Obama was an equally fake alternative. He didn’t offer inspiration, but manipulation. His new ideas were the same old ideas packaged around his personality, around new styles and designs fed through social media and media appearances. Unwilling to connect with opponents, reporters and even voters, he then settled for digging in on his grievances and breaking the rules by ruling the country unilaterally. Generation X cynicism fused with millennial brand awareness to create a political monster who might not be able to lie to the people all the time, but who cynically made the existence of his lies irrelevant. Stewart’s Daily Show had offered an antidote to the Bush era of patriotism, sincerity and decency. Its antidote was passive aggressive ridicule and political satire as sincerity. After the Bush era ended, Stewart and his fellow comedians had little left to do except take on the job of defending Obama, while occasionally critiquing him. They had become the official court jesters of the Democratic Party. It’s no wonder that Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, anticipating eight more years of Hillary, have chosen to move on. The genre has long since outlived its original response to 9/11 sincerity. It now exists only to feed on itself. To act as a comedic Media Matters churning out viral videos slamming opponents for some sin against the left while pretending to be part of mainstream consensus. Jon Stewart gave us the era of Obama. As that era of bad faith comes to a close, so does his own.
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He has many times. Just go looking. Easy to find. There is just such a larger pool to draw from when you look at conservatives. You should see the bit where he shows repubs blocking the 9/11 first responders bill. Another fine republican moment.
He will be missed but not by fox who is shown to be liars and idiots by stewart....just by playing tapes of their own words
[h=1]Jon Stewart’s America[/h] FEB. 12, 2015
Timothy Egan
Since the golden era of fake news is over, does this mean that what passes for real news and real politics are also over?
If only. Tune into one of the Sunday interview shows, if you can, and you’re bound to find the inevitable Senator Lindsey Graham talking about all the places we need to bomb now. Senator Ted Cruz will do an impression of the Tin Man without a heart or a brain, and Nancy Pelosi will demonstrate that humor impairment is bipartisan.
Throughout the week, the morning shows will be stuffed with viral pet videos, diet and makeup tips and — hey, Taylor Swift said what? They will do follow-ups on listicles and assorted click-bait from blogs, and someone will take Donald Trump seriously.
Sadly, it’s gotten only worse since Jon Stewart built a secular church around the nightly ritual of mockery of the deserving class. So, while more people are in on the joke, more people continue to offer a steady stream of material for the jokes.
“If he’s shooting fish in a barrel, we don’t always have to provide the fish,” said a Fox News personality, Greg Gutfeld, in a moment-of-Zen acknowledgment this week, following Stewart’s announcement that he’s stepping down from “The Daily Show” after more than 16 years as host. “And we provide a lot of fish.”
For Stewart, a gifted clown with wide-ranging curiosity, Fox News was not just a house of hypocrisy and endless source material. It was part of what made a great democracy harder to govern, and less likely to share a common narrative. He understood exactly what they were up to, even if some of their teleprompter readers never did.
“I think that Roger Ailes’s great gift was mainstreaming that nativist, paranoid streak in American politics, and putting it on television in a much prettier, shinier box,” he told Rolling Stone last year.
[h=2]Timothy Egan[/h] [h=3][/h]
Critics would say Stewart is a liberal apologist, a sop for President Obama. Certainly, Stewart is a lefty without a cause. Still, he’s skewered the president for his regular failings, from broken promises to veterans to not appearing in a free-speech moment in Paris.
But his politics are beside the point. Conservatives, in general, are not funny, outside of the missing-in-action P. J. O’Rourke. The best comedians do not back the status quo, or get paid to make the Koch brothers laugh.
When Stewart leaves later this year, he will walk away from an audience that will no longer take the theater of media-driven politics seriously. And as a promoter of serious books, he leaves his fans better informed. He’s been a public service — Consumer Reports, by way of the long-dead National Lampoon. And for many in the press, he says what they’ve always wanted to say, using an unprintable word as noun, verb and adjective.
After his takedown of Glenn Beck, writing crazy talk on a chalkboard between bursts of discordant tears, nobody except those with a radio embedded in their molars could listen to Beck.
Can anyone act on a stock-buying tip from Jim Cramer, the CNBC host, after Stewart showed him promoting garbage before the financial collapse on a show that tries to make funny with your money, barking “buy, buy, buy!” while banging a gong?
And “Crossfire,” the original shout-fest on CNN that tried to prove there are no 50 shades of gray in cable’s view of politics, only one dimension of wrong, was left exposed and shamefaced for what it is after Stewart told the hosts to “stop hurting America.”
Stewart didn’t degrade politics and the press. He walked through a degraded landscape, the tour guide who’s also a smartass. In the cheerleading phase of the Iraq war, when dissident voices were labeled traitors, Stewart called out the lies on which the invasion was built, long before most Democrats, and most reporters, ever did. It shouldn’t take a comedian, obviously, to do that.
“Where will I get my news every night?” asked Bill Clinton, in a tweet following Stewart’s announcement.
He could start with the existing newscasts, mostly operating as platforms for new pharmaceuticals. He could consider holding anchors riding through the streets of Manhattan in “blizzard-mobiles” to higher standards. Or force them to ask, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” That’s what Stewart did Wednesday night, in a bit on an executive order from Gov. Sam Brownback that now allows people to legally discriminate against gay and lesbian state workers.
“It being Kansas, I guess Brownback clicked his heels three times and said, ‘There’s no place like homophobia.’ ”
Stewart owes something to middle-aged “Saturday Night Live.” A brilliant comedian once appeared in a skit as a one-man mobile news unit, complete with a parabolic antenna mounted to his head. That comic is a United States senator now, Al Franken, of Minnesota. A role model for Stewart? Not likely. Franken left his humor at the Capitol entrance. Stewart would never get past the door.
Timothy Egan
Since the golden era of fake news is over, does this mean that what passes for real news and real politics are also over?
If only. Tune into one of the Sunday interview shows, if you can, and you’re bound to find the inevitable Senator Lindsey Graham talking about all the places we need to bomb now. Senator Ted Cruz will do an impression of the Tin Man without a heart or a brain, and Nancy Pelosi will demonstrate that humor impairment is bipartisan.
Throughout the week, the morning shows will be stuffed with viral pet videos, diet and makeup tips and — hey, Taylor Swift said what? They will do follow-ups on listicles and assorted click-bait from blogs, and someone will take Donald Trump seriously.
Sadly, it’s gotten only worse since Jon Stewart built a secular church around the nightly ritual of mockery of the deserving class. So, while more people are in on the joke, more people continue to offer a steady stream of material for the jokes.
“If he’s shooting fish in a barrel, we don’t always have to provide the fish,” said a Fox News personality, Greg Gutfeld, in a moment-of-Zen acknowledgment this week, following Stewart’s announcement that he’s stepping down from “The Daily Show” after more than 16 years as host. “And we provide a lot of fish.”
For Stewart, a gifted clown with wide-ranging curiosity, Fox News was not just a house of hypocrisy and endless source material. It was part of what made a great democracy harder to govern, and less likely to share a common narrative. He understood exactly what they were up to, even if some of their teleprompter readers never did.
“I think that Roger Ailes’s great gift was mainstreaming that nativist, paranoid streak in American politics, and putting it on television in a much prettier, shinier box,” he told Rolling Stone last year.
[h=2]Timothy Egan[/h] [h=3][/h]
Critics would say Stewart is a liberal apologist, a sop for President Obama. Certainly, Stewart is a lefty without a cause. Still, he’s skewered the president for his regular failings, from broken promises to veterans to not appearing in a free-speech moment in Paris.
But his politics are beside the point. Conservatives, in general, are not funny, outside of the missing-in-action P. J. O’Rourke. The best comedians do not back the status quo, or get paid to make the Koch brothers laugh.
When Stewart leaves later this year, he will walk away from an audience that will no longer take the theater of media-driven politics seriously. And as a promoter of serious books, he leaves his fans better informed. He’s been a public service — Consumer Reports, by way of the long-dead National Lampoon. And for many in the press, he says what they’ve always wanted to say, using an unprintable word as noun, verb and adjective.
After his takedown of Glenn Beck, writing crazy talk on a chalkboard between bursts of discordant tears, nobody except those with a radio embedded in their molars could listen to Beck.
Can anyone act on a stock-buying tip from Jim Cramer, the CNBC host, after Stewart showed him promoting garbage before the financial collapse on a show that tries to make funny with your money, barking “buy, buy, buy!” while banging a gong?
And “Crossfire,” the original shout-fest on CNN that tried to prove there are no 50 shades of gray in cable’s view of politics, only one dimension of wrong, was left exposed and shamefaced for what it is after Stewart told the hosts to “stop hurting America.”
Stewart didn’t degrade politics and the press. He walked through a degraded landscape, the tour guide who’s also a smartass. In the cheerleading phase of the Iraq war, when dissident voices were labeled traitors, Stewart called out the lies on which the invasion was built, long before most Democrats, and most reporters, ever did. It shouldn’t take a comedian, obviously, to do that.
“Where will I get my news every night?” asked Bill Clinton, in a tweet following Stewart’s announcement.
He could start with the existing newscasts, mostly operating as platforms for new pharmaceuticals. He could consider holding anchors riding through the streets of Manhattan in “blizzard-mobiles” to higher standards. Or force them to ask, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” That’s what Stewart did Wednesday night, in a bit on an executive order from Gov. Sam Brownback that now allows people to legally discriminate against gay and lesbian state workers.
“It being Kansas, I guess Brownback clicked his heels three times and said, ‘There’s no place like homophobia.’ ”
Stewart owes something to middle-aged “Saturday Night Live.” A brilliant comedian once appeared in a skit as a one-man mobile news unit, complete with a parabolic antenna mounted to his head. That comic is a United States senator now, Al Franken, of Minnesota. A role model for Stewart? Not likely. Franken left his humor at the Capitol entrance. Stewart would never get past the door.
How Jon Stewart turned lies into comedy and brainwashed a generation
By Kyle Smith
February 15, 2015 | 6:00am
So Brian Williams goes out (for six months) humiliated and derided. Jon Stewart goes out (permanently, one hopes) the same day, but on a giant Comedy Homecoming King float, with a 21-gun salute from the media, his path strewn with roses and teardrops.
Why?
Brian Williams lied about his personal exploits a few times. Jon Stewart was unabashedly and habitually dishonest.
Though Stewart has often claimed he does a “fake news show,” “The Daily Show” isn’t that. It’s a real news show punctuated with puns, jokes, asides and the occasional moment of staged sanctimony.
It contains real, unstaged sound bites about the days’ events and interviews about important policy matters.
Stewart is a journalist: an irresponsible and unprofessional one.
He is especially beloved by others in the journo game. (For every 100 viewers, he generated about 10 fawning profiles in the slicks, all of them saying the same thing: The jester tells the truth!).
Any standard liberal publication was as likely to contain an unflattering thought about Stewart as L’Osservatore Romano is to run a hit piece on the pope.
The hacks have a special love for Stewart because he’s their id. They don’t just think he’s funny, they thrill to his every sarcastic quip. They wish they could get away with being so one-sided, snarky and dismissive.
They wish they could skip over all the boring phone calls and the due diligence and the pretend fairness and just blurt out to their ideological enemies in Stewart style, “What the f–k is wrong with you?”
Most other journalists aren’t allowed to swear or to slam powerful figures (lest they be denied chances to interview them in future). Their editors make them tone down their opinions and cloak them behind weasel words like “critics say.” Journalists have to dress up in neutrality drag every day, and it’s a bore.
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Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart onstage at O’Reilly Vs. Stewart 2012: The Rumble In The Air-Conditioned Auditorium.Photo: Getty Images
Yet Stewart uses his funnyman status as a license to dispense with even the most minimal journalistic standards. Get both sides of the story?
Hey, I’m just a comedian, man. Try to be responsible about what the real issues are? Dude, that’s too heavy, we just want to set up the next d- -k joke.
Stewart is often derided by the right as having minimal impact and low ratings. That’s not true. He and Stephen Colbert ruled the late-night ratings among 18-to 34-year-olds for most of the last five years, though Jimmy Fallon has lately surpassed both.
About 522,000 Americans in that age range watch “The Daily Show” on an average night, but that means many millions of occasional viewers, with millions more watching clips online.
To a key audience, he was a strong influence. Longtime Cooper Union history professor Fred Siegel says his students constantly came to him repeating Stewart’s talking points.
College students, of course, are both little acquainted with realities of adult existence and walled off from conservative views, so they’re the perfect audience for Stewart’s shtick, which depends on assumptions that are as unquestioned as they are false.
This week’s “Daily Show” segment in which Stewart defended Williams was distilled, Everclear-strength Stewart. It was as amazing as watching Barbra Streisand run through a medley of her greatest hits in only seven minutes: In this little chunk of error, cliche, preening and deception Stewart managed to pack an example of just about everything that is unbearable about his style. It bears close study.
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Jon Stewart’s defense of Brian Williams was “The Daily Show” in a nutshell – laugh off a scandal and change the subject.Photo: Getty Images
Stewart made some mild jokes at the anchordude’s expense, interrupted with insufferable Jerry Lewis-style mugging, baby talk, high-pitched silly voices and the inevitable reference to whether Williams was “high” (authority figures getting high: always comedy gold to the campus audience).
Stewart slipped in a line of blatant editorializing: “Being caught is punishment enough, no?” Really? Why? If so, argue it, don’t just point the sheep in the direction you want.
Williams is a news anchor. A guy whose three main skills are being good-looking, an ability to read the English language out loud and seeming credible. To put his case in Stewart-ese:
“If you want to be considered a trustworthy source of facts, maybe try NOT LYING!!!”
Declaring that media coverage of Williams’ lies was “overkill,” Stewart then built a wedding cake of bullcrap, layer after layer of untruth.
His first move was to change the subject. He used a variant of the rhetorical fallacy known as the “tu quoque” argument, or calling out alleged hypocrisy. Taken to its endpoint, tu quoque (“you, too”) reasoning means no one would ever slam anyone for anything because, hey, we’re all imperfect.
Tu quoque-ism is a generally meaningless gotcha game that can, of course, be turned right around on Stewart: Hey, Jon, you really think you’re the guy to call foul on nuking media personalities who have made misstatements?
In high dudgeon, as though the thought weren’t already a cliche we’d all seen many times on Twitter and Facebook, Stewart declared sarcastically, “Finally, someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq War.”
Then came the inevitable gotcha sound bites: News figures discussing intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s WMD program. Why such a bizarre tangent into an unrelated matter? Because in Stewart’s mind, and those of his viewers, everything has to be the fault of an evil Republican, preferably George W. Bush.
Near the end of the segment, Stewart declares, with the prototypical combination of blustering self-righteousness and sarcasm that crystallizes his appeal to the college mentality, wonders whether the news shows will now start examining the “media malfeasance that led our country into the most catastrophic foreign policy decision in decades.”
Then (using comic bathos) Stewart cuts to more newscasters making apparently trivial points about Williams’ lying. Stewart’s logic is this: The media can’t report negatively on anything anymore, because they dropped the ball on Iraq.
Stewart doesn’t actually believe that: It’s just a cheap gambit meant to get his buddy Williams off the hook by minimizing his serial lying. If Stewart were a public defender, he’d be even funnier than he is as a comic.
What judge or jury could fail to bust out laughing if a defense attorney said, “I have no rebuttal of any of the charges against my client, but lots of other people not in this courtroom are guilty of stuff, too!”
I look forward to the next time a Republican assistant municipal treasurer in Dirt Falls, Idaho, says something awkward about race and Stewart says “I forgive this guy given that the actual vice president of the United States once said of Barack Obama, ‘I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.’”
Let’s look at the media reports on Iraq that Stewart is arguing make Williams’ untruths pale in comparison. Problem: Those reports were not lies. Journalists trying to figure out whether the war was justified called up credible experts with experience in the field and passed along what they said. As a more honest version of Stewart might say, “Dude. That’s not malfeasance. That’s Re. Por. Ting.”
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Photo: ZumaPress
Stewart added that “it’s like the Bush administration hired Temple Grandin to build a machine that kills the truth.” Even the audience of devotees seemed to find this simile baffling.
The idea that “Bush lied” is itself a lazy, ill-informed and false statement.
As Judge Laurence Silberman, co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week, essentially nobody in the Washington intelligence community doubted the major report that Iraq had an active WMD program in 2002.
The National Intelligence Estimate delivered to the Senate and President Bush said there was a 90 percent certainty of WMDs. Democrat George Tenet, the Clinton CIA director who continued to serve under Bush, said the case for WMDs was a “slam dunk.”
John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Joe Biden all looked at the intelligence and voted to authorize force. Sen. Jay Rockefeller argued strongly for the war. Then, years later, when it wasn’t going so well, he published a highly politicized report ripping Bush.
There is a serious case to be made against the Iraq War, but it’s a lot more complicated than the playground taunt, “Bush lied about WMDs.” (“Hey, I’m a comic, you expect me to do serious? Please welcome our next guest, Henry Kissinger!”)
Yet another lie on top of that is the absurd implication that the news media were too soft on Bush. The only way you could possibly consider the media to be too conservative would be if you were an extremist well to their left, which Stewart is.
During the Iraq War buildup, even as overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress authorized the use of force, 59 percent of the sound bites aired by the evening newscasts were antiwar, 29 percent pro-war.
To take another of innumerable examples, in 2006 Bush had about the same approval ratings that Obama suffered in 2014. The network news both commissioned far more polls when Bush stood to suffer, and reported on the Bush results far more.
Again, this isn’t close: The score was 52 to 2, as in 52 mentions of low Bush approval ratings versus two mentions of (even lower, at times) Obama approval ratings.
In every Gallup poll this century, more Americans called the media “too liberal” than “too conservative.” The numbers were 45 to 15 in 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion. In 2008, as Obama was being elected, it was 47 to 13. Last fall it was 44 to 19.
Thanks to polemicists and clowns, the myth that “Bush lied” has caught on, and now a majority of Americans believe it. Stewart-ism won the day.
Liberal comics make things up, liberal journalists chortle and praise and internalize the lies.
Before you know it, if you point out that Bill O’Reilly’s audience is just as well informed as NPR’s (as a Pew poll found), or that Sarah Palin never said, “I can see Russia from my house” (that was “Saturday Night Live”), you’re just a buzzkill.
Brian Williams has become a joke for telling lies, but Jon Stewart is a liar for the way he told jokes.
http://nypost.com/2015/02/15/how-jon-stewart-turned-lies-into-comedy-and-brainwashed-a-generation/
By Kyle Smith
February 15, 2015 | 6:00am
So Brian Williams goes out (for six months) humiliated and derided. Jon Stewart goes out (permanently, one hopes) the same day, but on a giant Comedy Homecoming King float, with a 21-gun salute from the media, his path strewn with roses and teardrops.
Why?
Brian Williams lied about his personal exploits a few times. Jon Stewart was unabashedly and habitually dishonest.
Though Stewart has often claimed he does a “fake news show,” “The Daily Show” isn’t that. It’s a real news show punctuated with puns, jokes, asides and the occasional moment of staged sanctimony.
It contains real, unstaged sound bites about the days’ events and interviews about important policy matters.
Stewart is a journalist: an irresponsible and unprofessional one.
He is especially beloved by others in the journo game. (For every 100 viewers, he generated about 10 fawning profiles in the slicks, all of them saying the same thing: The jester tells the truth!).
Any standard liberal publication was as likely to contain an unflattering thought about Stewart as L’Osservatore Romano is to run a hit piece on the pope.
The hacks have a special love for Stewart because he’s their id. They don’t just think he’s funny, they thrill to his every sarcastic quip. They wish they could get away with being so one-sided, snarky and dismissive.
They wish they could skip over all the boring phone calls and the due diligence and the pretend fairness and just blurt out to their ideological enemies in Stewart style, “What the f–k is wrong with you?”
Most other journalists aren’t allowed to swear or to slam powerful figures (lest they be denied chances to interview them in future). Their editors make them tone down their opinions and cloak them behind weasel words like “critics say.” Journalists have to dress up in neutrality drag every day, and it’s a bore.
Modal Trigger
Yet Stewart uses his funnyman status as a license to dispense with even the most minimal journalistic standards. Get both sides of the story?
Hey, I’m just a comedian, man. Try to be responsible about what the real issues are? Dude, that’s too heavy, we just want to set up the next d- -k joke.
Stewart is often derided by the right as having minimal impact and low ratings. That’s not true. He and Stephen Colbert ruled the late-night ratings among 18-to 34-year-olds for most of the last five years, though Jimmy Fallon has lately surpassed both.
About 522,000 Americans in that age range watch “The Daily Show” on an average night, but that means many millions of occasional viewers, with millions more watching clips online.
To a key audience, he was a strong influence. Longtime Cooper Union history professor Fred Siegel says his students constantly came to him repeating Stewart’s talking points.
College students, of course, are both little acquainted with realities of adult existence and walled off from conservative views, so they’re the perfect audience for Stewart’s shtick, which depends on assumptions that are as unquestioned as they are false.
This week’s “Daily Show” segment in which Stewart defended Williams was distilled, Everclear-strength Stewart. It was as amazing as watching Barbra Streisand run through a medley of her greatest hits in only seven minutes: In this little chunk of error, cliche, preening and deception Stewart managed to pack an example of just about everything that is unbearable about his style. It bears close study.
Modal Trigger
Stewart made some mild jokes at the anchordude’s expense, interrupted with insufferable Jerry Lewis-style mugging, baby talk, high-pitched silly voices and the inevitable reference to whether Williams was “high” (authority figures getting high: always comedy gold to the campus audience).
Stewart slipped in a line of blatant editorializing: “Being caught is punishment enough, no?” Really? Why? If so, argue it, don’t just point the sheep in the direction you want.
Williams is a news anchor. A guy whose three main skills are being good-looking, an ability to read the English language out loud and seeming credible. To put his case in Stewart-ese:
“If you want to be considered a trustworthy source of facts, maybe try NOT LYING!!!”
Declaring that media coverage of Williams’ lies was “overkill,” Stewart then built a wedding cake of bullcrap, layer after layer of untruth.
His first move was to change the subject. He used a variant of the rhetorical fallacy known as the “tu quoque” argument, or calling out alleged hypocrisy. Taken to its endpoint, tu quoque (“you, too”) reasoning means no one would ever slam anyone for anything because, hey, we’re all imperfect.
Tu quoque-ism is a generally meaningless gotcha game that can, of course, be turned right around on Stewart: Hey, Jon, you really think you’re the guy to call foul on nuking media personalities who have made misstatements?
In high dudgeon, as though the thought weren’t already a cliche we’d all seen many times on Twitter and Facebook, Stewart declared sarcastically, “Finally, someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq War.”
Then came the inevitable gotcha sound bites: News figures discussing intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s WMD program. Why such a bizarre tangent into an unrelated matter? Because in Stewart’s mind, and those of his viewers, everything has to be the fault of an evil Republican, preferably George W. Bush.
Near the end of the segment, Stewart declares, with the prototypical combination of blustering self-righteousness and sarcasm that crystallizes his appeal to the college mentality, wonders whether the news shows will now start examining the “media malfeasance that led our country into the most catastrophic foreign policy decision in decades.”
Then (using comic bathos) Stewart cuts to more newscasters making apparently trivial points about Williams’ lying. Stewart’s logic is this: The media can’t report negatively on anything anymore, because they dropped the ball on Iraq.
Stewart doesn’t actually believe that: It’s just a cheap gambit meant to get his buddy Williams off the hook by minimizing his serial lying. If Stewart were a public defender, he’d be even funnier than he is as a comic.
What judge or jury could fail to bust out laughing if a defense attorney said, “I have no rebuttal of any of the charges against my client, but lots of other people not in this courtroom are guilty of stuff, too!”
I look forward to the next time a Republican assistant municipal treasurer in Dirt Falls, Idaho, says something awkward about race and Stewart says “I forgive this guy given that the actual vice president of the United States once said of Barack Obama, ‘I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.’”
Let’s look at the media reports on Iraq that Stewart is arguing make Williams’ untruths pale in comparison. Problem: Those reports were not lies. Journalists trying to figure out whether the war was justified called up credible experts with experience in the field and passed along what they said. As a more honest version of Stewart might say, “Dude. That’s not malfeasance. That’s Re. Por. Ting.”
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Stewart added that “it’s like the Bush administration hired Temple Grandin to build a machine that kills the truth.” Even the audience of devotees seemed to find this simile baffling.
The idea that “Bush lied” is itself a lazy, ill-informed and false statement.
As Judge Laurence Silberman, co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week, essentially nobody in the Washington intelligence community doubted the major report that Iraq had an active WMD program in 2002.
The National Intelligence Estimate delivered to the Senate and President Bush said there was a 90 percent certainty of WMDs. Democrat George Tenet, the Clinton CIA director who continued to serve under Bush, said the case for WMDs was a “slam dunk.”
John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Joe Biden all looked at the intelligence and voted to authorize force. Sen. Jay Rockefeller argued strongly for the war. Then, years later, when it wasn’t going so well, he published a highly politicized report ripping Bush.
There is a serious case to be made against the Iraq War, but it’s a lot more complicated than the playground taunt, “Bush lied about WMDs.” (“Hey, I’m a comic, you expect me to do serious? Please welcome our next guest, Henry Kissinger!”)
Yet another lie on top of that is the absurd implication that the news media were too soft on Bush. The only way you could possibly consider the media to be too conservative would be if you were an extremist well to their left, which Stewart is.
During the Iraq War buildup, even as overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress authorized the use of force, 59 percent of the sound bites aired by the evening newscasts were antiwar, 29 percent pro-war.
To take another of innumerable examples, in 2006 Bush had about the same approval ratings that Obama suffered in 2014. The network news both commissioned far more polls when Bush stood to suffer, and reported on the Bush results far more.
Again, this isn’t close: The score was 52 to 2, as in 52 mentions of low Bush approval ratings versus two mentions of (even lower, at times) Obama approval ratings.
In every Gallup poll this century, more Americans called the media “too liberal” than “too conservative.” The numbers were 45 to 15 in 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion. In 2008, as Obama was being elected, it was 47 to 13. Last fall it was 44 to 19.
Thanks to polemicists and clowns, the myth that “Bush lied” has caught on, and now a majority of Americans believe it. Stewart-ism won the day.
Liberal comics make things up, liberal journalists chortle and praise and internalize the lies.
Before you know it, if you point out that Bill O’Reilly’s audience is just as well informed as NPR’s (as a Pew poll found), or that Sarah Palin never said, “I can see Russia from my house” (that was “Saturday Night Live”), you’re just a buzzkill.
Brian Williams has become a joke for telling lies, but Jon Stewart is a liar for the way he told jokes.
http://nypost.com/2015/02/15/how-jon-stewart-turned-lies-into-comedy-and-brainwashed-a-generation/
Lol, Joe is such an extreme loon I don't even know who he listens to. Even Sean Hannity is too far to the left for him, lol. And I'm not picking that name out of a hat, Joe really said that, lol. When Hannity is left to you, you are pretty much on a level of craziness that is hard to measure.
I've been enjoying his dow predictions, gold futures and his predicted fred thompson administration. He spews this nonsense all over the interrnet....not just here...other sites, facebook. Love his made up fake quotes of other posters....but most of all, his 1922 picture of new york city to prove the fed has ruined the economy....that was my favorite Walter post.
Hahahaha, that was classic. The dude is a real life loon. One of my favorites, which he's done multiple times, is he'll show an old picture of the Detroit skyline... then he'll post a random picture of a destroyed building and say something about look what liberals have done. It is absolutely hilarious!!
