On Monday, Jon Stewart used the opening of The Daily Show to respond to criticism of his rally on the Mall from noted left wing commentators Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and Bill Maher. The condensed version is that the three most prominent liberal television personalities – other than Stewart and Stephen Colbert – called Stewart out for making a false equivalence between their programs and the hysterical bullshit on FOX News. Stewart responded that he wasn’t trying to make both sides seem equal, nor find the perfect balance of blame.
What Stewart failed to communicate, which is odd because he is easily one of the most skilled communicators in the country at the moment, is that he sees the way our political discourse conducts itself as the problem. This is particularly true of Stewart’s main targets: cable “news” programs. On Monday, Stewart clarified that televised one-upmanship is the problem, and then made the meta-point that if that wasn’t clear they could certainly hash this out on each other’s shows. Here is the relevant part from Stewart’s heartfelt and much linked closing speech in front of the Capitol:
“We live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies. But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country’s twenty-four hour, politico pundit perpetual panic-conflictinator did not cause our problems. But its existence makes solving them that much harder.”
Stewart seems to think that Olbermann, Maddow, Maher and the rest didn’t understand that he was criticizing the entire system. He wasn’t trying to say “both sides do it the same”, he was trying to say that what side you are on is irrelevant when it comes to cable politics because the medium itself is the problem. Whether Olbermann, Maddow, and Maher like it or not, whether they argue with facts instead of hyperbolic horse manure, doesn’t matter as much as the fact that both sides are primarily interested in scoring points on behalf of their very narrow audiences. Stewart sees a medium that has no relevance to the vast majority of Americans, whatever arguments it puts forward. He concludes his speech by saying that it is only in government and on cable teevee that America is that acrimonious. His plea for sanity in those corridors is undertaken on behalf of the great bulk of America that doesn’t have time to make politics a big part of their lives.
However, Stewart has a problem of his own in that context: whether he likes it or not he is a part of that bankrupt system of political hysteria. His mistake was thinking that he could break out of his usual medium to deliver a message that condemned that medium. He can’t. Jon Stewart is a creature of cable news whether he’s behind his desk or up on stage on the Mall. That enormous crowd wasn’t part of the great silent majority, it wasn’t comprised of voters who’ve been alienated by cable bloviation. Those people are cable news fans. At the very least they watch The Daily Show, and that makes them part of that very small minority that hoots and howls and forwards video links of pundits stepping on their tongues, that cares about the high tech marionette show that Stewart spends so much airtime ridiculing.
In the end, that’s why Olbermann, Maddow and Maher have a point. There is no rising above this fray, there is no calling a halt. Howard Beale is dead and there are no virgins on cable news. Being a part of that system means that you can’t decry it wholesale without being guilty of the kind of lame “both sides do it!” equivalency that critics of the Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear have leveled at it. In his critique of Stewart, Maher made this exact point in reference to global warming denialists:
“I don’t need to pretend that both sides have a point here. And I don’t care what left or right commentators say about it. I only care what climate scientists say about it.”*
Having a hyperventilating media debate about things scientists consider settled may indeed be harmful, as Stewart says, but that doesn’t mean that ceding ground or calming down wouldn’t be even worse. Letting the anti-science denialists be the only ones screaming won’t help those relatively non-political people who don’t care for the shouting, it won’t entice more of them to take a reasoned survey of things for themselves. It would only leave them even less well informed by allowing provably false information to go unchallenged.
The charge of false equivalence is therefore both beside the point and deadly accurate, because hyperbolic media nuttiness is a closed system. The people who will hear Stewart’s message are the ones who already know about it. The people Stewart was trying to reach will never hear his message because they’ve already tuned out the system of which he is a part. Stewart is right that our hyperactive, attention whore “news” apparatus is a terrible thing that needs to be made patient and dignified, but he’s wrong to think it can be made so from within.
*And let us pause for a moment to note the irony of scientific respect from anti-vaccination/milk-can-kill-you advocate Maher.
