November 12, 2010
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Stewart or Maddow Who is really in the game?
Twitter sometimes, is a horrible medium. You can really slanted information especially in 140 character bursts. Last night I saw many a tweet flowing through my stream saying things like “Stewart defends Bush!” and “Stewart defends torture and waterboarding!” and “Stewart defends Fox, says they are nonpartisan!”. This made me feel ill and I was extremely reluctant to watch the video of the Stewart/Maddow interview for fear that I would lose all respect for Jon Stewart and end up having to go back and retract everything I said in the last two posts.
I shouldn’t have worried. Stewart’s response is far more interesting and nuanced than those absurd characterizations. And in fact I found myself still agreeing with him a lot.
But really, it’s a very thoughtful, interesting exchange at much higher level than most of the interviews you hear on television. I agreed with much of what both of them were saying. I actually ended up watched it twice, once the clipped version that appeared on the Rachel Maddow show and once the full version which I linked to below. The interview really made me think a lot. There are few interviews I can say that of. There’s still a lot of what they talked about that I’m still mulling over. These are complex issues that I don’t think are entirely black and white. I know I’ll be thinking about a lot of this for a long time.
Overall my estimation of Stewart and Maddow both grew from watching this.
But here judge for yourself.
One of the things that stood out to me though in this interview is that I think Stewart is really really fundamentally wrong if he thinks he can or is “out of the game” or that he can’t do as much as someone like Maddow to effect real change. Either he is saying that simply to be ironic or to mock Maddow or he’s living under a little bit of a delusion.Jon Stewart actually has significantly more of an ability to effect change than Maddow. Even with his considerable restraint in wading into the political arena or perhaps BECAUSE of that restraint he still has the kind of sway over masses of people that can move mountains. He might not realize it and maybe not realizing that is part of what keeps him sane and helps him be effective but it’s still the truth. If you have the respect of a huge portion of the youth of a generation across the political spectrum (if significantly tilted to the left) then you have enormous power. Recall that Stewart was able to give voice to a deeper level of Left leaning criticism of President Obama than anyone in the media during his interview of him. And that has enormous ramifications. And he’s done other profoundly influential interviews on his own show and on other networks.
Don’t mistake 300K people signing a petition to save Olbermann’s job and 215K people showing up in person to see Stewart and Colbert hold a big party on the national mall. There is NO comparison. For good or ill Stewart’s power is far far greater.
It will be interesting to see if Stewart tries to or is even able to “enter the game” more directly. I really wish he would talk to Al Franken and have a really long deep private conversation with him. And I would pay a great deal of money to be a fly on the wall during that conversation. It would be fascinating.
I don’t think Stewart would ever go fully the Al Franken route, but I would love to see him go at least a little bit further in that direction. And if things ever got bad enough that we really needed him to, no matter his personal wants, I’d wish that he went much much further.
But that doesn’t sound like where he wants to be. He doesn’t want to be anywhere close. He wants to be in this guy’s place:
But I think he’s already gone way beyond that. And there’s not really any going back for him.
Comments (4)
lol great addition of Carlin at the end!
I watched the interview on Maddow last night. I’ll have to watch the full interview on her website later. I agree with Stewart about being out of the game. He is a comedic commentator talking about the game. While some of the news commentator methods may involve comedy these days, they are still going out doing journalism. Stewart does not do that. He reports on shit already investigated. He’s talking about things in the media, he does not fashion things for the media (bearing in mind, he may be part of what is talked about in the media, of course). In that respect, Jon is not in the game, Maddow is. This is the news game, of course, and I saw them slipping between talking about journalism and politics. These are two separate games. When it comes to politics, neither of them are particularly in the game: none of them are politicians. In that capacity, they are both in the same game talking about politics. They are both equally, in important respects, political commentators. But with respect to the news game, they are wholly apart in the most substantive ways. The rally was Jon stepping into the political game in some respects, but as he says, not entirely. Still, it seemed they were conflating two games.
He did say that he can’t compare his 22 minutes 4 days a week with the 24 hour news cycle or even the 5 nights 50 minutes that all the others get. Jon Stewart is a political figure though whether he wants it or not. He is currently the most trusted newsman…and he’s not a newsman.
@bryangoodrich - Yeah I think the games overlap a LOT which is why the conflation was so easy for them to slip in. For example when Stewart interviews President Obama he is very much covering news, commenting on recent news, creating news, and effecting the political landscape.
And maybe this is a little imprecise but I think there’s sort of an underlying influence game that connects these activities. What gets covered in news heavily influences people and policy. Politics is directly the attempt to influence people, either the masses or other politicians in order to enact policy.
It’s true that Maddow can cover a real news story and present it as fact without making it a joke and that can influence a lot of people in ways that comedy and satire rarely can. People will take those stories seriously if they are reported seriously. Stewart would have a harder time doing that. He’d have to hide it in comedy and hope that the news media picks it up from his coverage.
But they do sometimes. Sometimes the things Stewart points to can drive the media to investigate and cover it. It’s happened before. Colbert, especially has sort of created stories in his interview segments and appearances. Stewart’s show has caused media networks to change their policies.That’s pretty close to being in the same game.
Also as a matter of practice I’ve been seeing the political and the media rolls blurring a lot more lately. They were always intricately linked but now politicians, political commentators, political hosts, actors… there’s tons of crossover. Fox News does it deliberately but even if they didn’t there would simply be a fact that name recognition and fund raising is such a major part of the election process these days that simply being in the media in any capacity radically increases your chance of being able to run for office. And on the other side, the political class now spends virtually all its time glued to how their policies “play” in the media because they know that that has such a huge impact on that component of public opinion that they can influence, the influencing of which is essential for them to do their job and to get re-elected. How something might or does play in the media can very much impact a politician’s political decisions.
I agree with you that in the purest sense of news: going out and figuring out what’s new in the world and telling people about it, Stewart doesn’t do that exactly. He goes out and figures out what other people are telling people is new in the world, tells people about it and then mocks the people telling it for the absurd way they are telling it. The only actual reporting he’s doing is reporting on reporting. But there are an awful lot of people for which that’s the primary way in which they discover what’s new in the world so for them it IS their news coverage.
absolutely loved the maddow/stewart interview.