The September 26 issue of Time magazine carried this cover line over the heads of Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers, and Jimmy Kimmel: “We Joke. You Decide.” The allusion to the Fox News tagline was deliberate. The subheadline announced they would report on “The seriously partisan politics of late-night comedy.”
Finally, liberals are acknowledging what conservatives have claimed for years.
Inside, the headline was “The New Politics of Late Night: In a wild election with a ripe orange target, comics are ditching balance and taking sides.” Time writer Richard Zoglin began with a collection of Bee stingers, including her description of the Republican convention as “a poorly attended rage-a-thon of hemorrhoidal has-beens.”
But just when you thought Zoglin was going to concede – and celebrate – the left-wing tilt of late-night TV, his analysis fell apart, as it normally does when liberals are called to analyze the obvious.
Zoglin quoted Bee saying Jon Stewart “worked really hard to try to be nonpartisan.” Baloney. But Zoglin proclaimed that the departures of Stewart, David Letterman, and Colbert’s fake-Bill-O’Reilly brought “an unexpected and largely unappreciated payoff.” The new comedians shooting arrows “from the left flank” have “triggered an extreme makeover” of satire, now more pointed and “partisan than ever before.”
This is a payoff....for whom? Zoglin touted their “fresh perspective on the increasingly vitriolic U.S. political scene.” But they are the ones increasingly overflowing with typically infantile vitriol about their opponents being “hemorrhoidal.” What’s “fresh” about that?
Apparently the “payoff” is the comedians convincing the press to get even nastier with Republicans. Trevor Noah told Time “there’s a certain level of naivete when you say Hillary Clinton is worse than Trump. I think that’s a very dangerous position to be in. And I think the press has gotten to a place where they are realizing it’s about truth and not neutrality.”
The comedians and the press must favor “the truth.” That’s the Clinton side -- the lovers of “truth”? Trump’s existence is somehow entirely mythical, as Bee contended: “News organizations simply are not equipped to cover a candidate whose entire being is a lie.”
It gets better, folks. Citing NBC’s Seth Meyers, Zoglin claimed “it is rare, not to say unprecedented, for the host of a mainstream network to push such a blatant political viewpoint, yet Meyers says NBC is fully on board.” Zoglin somehow slept through the precedent of the last two election cycles, where Comcast loaded up Barack Obama’s campaign treasury and NBC added in-kind contributions at the newsrooms and entertainment studios. In 2012, what NBC comedian mocked Obama? Which NBC comedian didn’t mock Mitt Romney? Obama knew he could show up at Comedy Central with that “nonpartisan” Jon Stewart slobbering at his feet, complaint, in awe.
The “satire” spared the Democrats never seems to come up. Zoglin briefly mentioned Mrs. Clinton “gets her share of jabs,” but he couldn’t be bothered to quote one, while he eagerly shared anti-Trump insults like Bee’s “sociopathic 70-year-old toddler.”
He didn’t mention how Seth Meyers lectured grumpy Bernie backers at Democrat convention time: “We are on the cusp of electing a racist demagogue, and that never ends well. I don’t know what class you ditched to go to those Bernie rallies, but I have a feeling it was history.” By way of contrast, Jimmy Kimmel offered his show to Hillary to let her open a jar of pickles to mock those who would question her healthiness.
The network comedians are pressuring the network “news” to abandon any pretense of fairness and use the full force of their propaganda power to tar and feather Trump. It’s working.
