Stewart, Colbert

Coates has a quote from formerly bow-tied right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson on the subject of John Stewart:

No, I think Jon Stewart is dishonest. And by the way, I also think he's a sacred cow. There's nobody who has the huevos to attacks Jon Stewart because he's too popular. The press sucks up to him like I've never seen -- it's like Oprah. Jon Stewart, all the kids watch Jon Stewart. He's brilliant. I would like to see somebody have the stones to come out and say, Jon Stewart's kind of a pompous jerk, actually.

Funny thing is, I kind of agree with him, except the part about John Stewart being a pompous jerk (that sentiment can probably be attributed to Tucker's sour grapes). But Stewart does seem oddly untouchable. I think there's a feeling amongst the media and even politicians that there's just no way to win in a tangle with the Daily Show. Stewart can eviscerate you with embarrassing video clips night after night, and anytime you try to attack him he retreats to his "I'm just an ordinary citizen" or "I'm just a comedian" position of low status, so that suddenly you find yourself in a public feud with the court jester. If there's something cynical about Stewart and the Daily Show, it's that he's mastered this low-status/high-visibility combination to devastating effect, all the while pretending to be a humble, ordinary guy just trying to make sense of it all.

Oh, and on a slightly different note: I've never really felt that John Stewart is himself, when it comes right down to it, particularly funny. He's okay. But I think John Stewart's genius isn't as a performer, but as an administrator and institutional leader. If he were a WWII general, he'd be Eisenhower--maybe not the most gifted tactician on the field, but certainly gifted at the political task of commanding the respect of everyone below him and making sure that everyone is doing their part to keep the great juggernaut moving forward (I always liked Eisenhower's quote that the most important weapons in the war were the Jeep and the C-47 cargo plane--war at his level was just one big logistics problem, wasn't it?). In interviews with him about the show I get the impression that after the day's frantic process of writing the bits and putting together all the clips and doing rehearsal, doing the actual show is almost an afterthought. And indeed, when you look at his performances, there's not a lot there: he's kind of the straight man to his own material, expressing outrage at outrageous things and smiling at funny things and generally behaving in a way that is aligned with the audience. It's literally an effortless performance. He's not making us laugh--rather, the material is making us laugh, and John's just kind of emceeing the whole thing.

Colbert, on the other hand, I see as Patton: pure tactical genius. Where Stewart is just kind of amusing in a get-along-go-along sort of way, Colbert is really fucking funny and just absolutely razor sharp at all times--born for battle, so to speak. Where Stewart gently leads his audience, Colbert completely owns his. He's a beast. And his performances--all done completely in character--are amongst the most effortful you see anywhere.

So anyway--yes, I think Tucker is right that no one has the balls to go after Stewart, but I think there's a good reason for that. I wouldn't want to go up against Eisenhower and Patton, either.

Stewart strikes back

Ok, this is a pretty bad pwn:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

In Cramer We Trust

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Economic Crisis

This kind of reminds me of the time I was on BART and these frattish Arizona State kids tried wise-assing some hardened bike messenger dudes, and the bike messenger guys just totally turned it around on them and belittled them the whole ride. Chris D'Anna (who was visiting) turned to me and said, "I don't think they expected them to defend themselves."

Jon Stewart: Gadfly

As I might have mentioned before, Socrates used to pass the time by accosting important and powerful people in the public square and annoying the hell out of them by asking them exactly what they meant when they spoke about things like justice, courage, honor, etc. Typically, the important person would start in on some explanation or another until they faltered under Socrates' questioning and contradicted themselves, thus revealing in humiliating fashion which bodily orifice they had been talking out of all along.

Predictably, this got Socrates executed. During the trial, though, he tried to explain to the jury why someone like him was beneficial to the state by likening himself to a gadfly that keeps a sleepy horse active and alert:

For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the state and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.

Today in America, 2400 years or so later, the national gadfly remains an important position and one that is vital to the health of the state. I imagine that the press fancies itself in this role, holding leaders accountable and asking them the hard questions, but I think for some time now the press has been symbiotically subsumed into the Whole Sort Of General Mish Mash of Washington, and has fully bought in to its Orwellian obfuscations of language and contrived narratives.

And so the gadfly role has been filled, I think, by someone truly outside the Washington establishment: Jon Stewart. Nobody else gets down to the Socratic nuts and bolts of rigorously exposing blatant contradictions or asking those in power what they mean when they say X. For example, during the Republican convention we heard a lot about Sarah Palin's "small town values"--but only the Daily Show had the good idea of asking people what these values were:



And could Karl Rove--who is perhaps the best exemplar of the revolving-door relationship between the political establishment and the punditry--have been eviscerated like this by anyone other than Stewart?



It's a shame that the Daily Show has been on hiatus during this pig/lipstick flap. The response to it probably would have been pretty entertaining--and pretty good for the country.

The war-free evening news

An article in the Times today talks about dwindling coverage of the wars on the major networks:

According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)

It is a little surprising to me that at this point in the year the networks have devoted less than an hour to reporting on the Iraq War (the fact that I get virtually zero of my news from the evening news notwithstanding). It is very surprising to me, however, that reporters are having trouble getting their stories out. I mean, I understand that 22 minutes is not a lot of time, but it's not as though television is the only possible outlet for news. There is an invention called the internet which allows limitless content to be delivered to the viewer--why not have the reporters make their stories available online?

The thing is, you hear a lot about how the internet is causing old media to go extinct--TV news divisions are whithering, newspapers are folding or reducing staff--but what hasn't changed is the real value of original news reporting. Without reporters out in the world writing stories and giving first-person accounts, there would be no news content to blog about or analyze endlessly on television. Reporting is still the fuel that runs the news-media engine. And so I think that not distributing these news stories--if not on TV, then on the internet somehow--amounts to throwing away something valuable for no good reason.

One innovative thing TV news organizations could do is start posting their reports on YouTube and embedding advertisements into the video itself to raise revenue. That way, the video would be searchable and easily embeddable in in the blogs, and gain far more exposure than if it sat on some little-visited proprietary news site somewhere.

Another thing the news organizations could do is start desanitizing their war reporting. As it is now, there is a general aversion to showing real violence and blood and gore--especially when it is American soldiers who are bearing the brunt of it. The genteel standards of evening TV news--and TV news in general--forbids much of this, but I think the same limitations do not apply on the internet (you could simply have a disclaimer that warned the viewer of graphic content). So you could have really gritty, real reporting, with people cursing and dying and everything.

I would add also that it's not just the genteel standards of TV that bar a lot of the grittier coverage of the war--there is also the residual effect of the pseudo-patriotic self-censoring mode that causes the media to suppress "negative" images of the war. When was the last time we saw a casket on television? The last time we saw a dead American soldier? This is a war, no? These things do happen, right? Maybe one reason people aren't very interested in the war coverage is because the war coverage typically omits the most important and visceral part of the story.

PS: It's kind of interesting to note that much of the substance for this NYT story comes from an interview on the Daily Show. Indeed, the Daily Show interview is so central to the article that it seems if it weren't for the Daily Show, the article never would have been written. I'm not sure if this means that the Times sucks or that Jon Stewart is awesome.