Liberals are already getting verklempt over Jon Stewart retiring from The Daily Show. On the front of Sunday’s Arts & Style section of The Washington Post, the headline is “Shrug it off. John would want it that way.”
“The longer the run and more devoted the fan base, the louder the wails,” proclaimed TV critic Hank Stuever as “Jon Stewart’s incomparable, culturally significant run as the host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show cuts deeper than the usual sign-off.” His devotees “still speak the language of denial: How can he leave us?” (Italics his.)
Journalists should ask themselves if they aren’t perhaps overdoing the “incomparable cultural significance" part, especially when Stuever acknowledges in this gushy review that Stewart’s presence isn’t ending mass shootings, human rights outrages, and foreign policy crises.
But back to the mourning:
How, for just one example, can Stewart turn his back on such a bountiful, irresistible clown car full of GOP presidential hopefuls sputtering down the road to 2016? How can he decline the juicy gift that is the Donald Trump campaign? For that matter, how can he turn away the gift of the heavily freighted, never-quite-airborne Hillary Clinton campaign?
More than any other recent late-night finale, I’m hearing from viewers who are not just sentimental about The Daily Show With Jon Stewart coming to an end, they are gravely concerned. These are the people who have come to rely on Stewart (and his talented staff) as a trusted source of information. They view Stewart as the light that consistently showed the way out of some rather dark tunnels of despair.
This is where Stuever needs to acknowledge this is all about liberals and the program they love where conservatives are “vampire demons” who are dissected by comedian-reporters with slash-and-burn editing techniques. No liberal journalist who lets Planned Parenthood complain about activist editing ever seemed to notice a conservative critique of Team Stewart’s hatchet jobs.
No one was ever as hip and no one ever projected the “plain truth” like Jonny:
Ultimately, though, no matter how much the media or the politicos were hip to Stewart’s style, they would almost always be the losers in this equation — old school, old ways, hopelessly unhip to the plain truth. The Daily Show shtick always held that Stewart and his viewers believed themselves too cool to be spun.
What rot. “Too cool to be spun”? Is that why Stewart made two secret visits to the Obama White House?
That didn’t make Stuever’s valentine. Instead, we get Stuever turning Stewart into half-Murrow, half-Mark Twain:
If you still fail to grasp why an entire generation considers Stewart to be so much more than just a comedy/talk-show host and instead regards him as both their Edward R. Murrow and their Mark Twain, then just do the math: If you first voted as an 18-year-old in the 2000 election (or even if you just meant to do so, harangued by all those MTV "Rock the Vote" ads interrupting your TRL daze), then you are now in your mid-30s. An election has never transpired for you without Stewart's nightly skewering of political convention and old-school media mediocrity.
So everyone born in the early 1980s loves Stewart? (Our NewsBusters staff belies that gush.) Liberal Stewart fans who think their fake anchorman is sooo above “old-school media mediocrity” never wonder if other people find his sappy interviews with Obama, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, and other liberal stars to be an absolute demonstration of fawning mediocrity. There’s nothing fake in Stewart’s twinkling admiration. It’s the same thing these liberals get in the “old-school media,” even on supposedly hard-news forums like 60 Minutes.
Stuever eventually arrived at the honest take that this is about the “bluer” half of America, that this was how liberals coped with Gore losing in 2000 and the War on Terror:
While half of America flocked to the jingoistic pep rallies of Fox News, the other, bluer half started e-mailing one another and blogging about the best jabs from the previous night’s episode of The Daily Show.
By the time the 2004 presidential campaign came around, Stewart’s viewers relied on the show as heavily as the antiwar movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s leaned on its music. Stewart and his writing staff perfected a lightning-quick ability to fashion a retort out of the day’s news. Instead of guitar riffs they mastered video clip collages — supercuts — in which a politician or a pundit could be indicted and lampooned simply by his or her own words and how he or she delivered them.
The supercut has a remarkable power to reduce partisan talking points to the repetitive ravings of apparent lunatics. It emerged as a refreshing antidote to the doublespeak and limp reporting that characterized foreign policy and war-mongering in the middle aughts. After showing a particularly effective one, Stewart wouldn’t even need a punchline. He could just smirk and throw to commercial.
Stuever blatantly declared that one of Stewart’s legacies was more liberal swagger in the TV news game, fairness and balance be damned:
Journalists, who were among Stewart’s biggest fans, eventually learned not to feel threatened; over time, their work even began to echo some of The Daily Show’s techniques. Formerly staid news organizations (The Post among them) gave a broader license to reporters and bloggers to cut through disinformation, or to ease up on a stultifying obligation to always air “both sides” of an issue ad infinitum, or to drop in a wry or even knifey observation here and there.
Perhaps the most vomit-inducing Stewart gush came at the very end, where Stuever imagines this left-wing comedy icon as...Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, who now sends the everyday YouTuber on to continue his legacy:
It may be a sappy way to send The Daily Show off — like Glinda the Good Witch telling Dorothy Gale that the ruby slippers on her feet had the power to send her home all along — but that’s how it feels: You had the power all along. You are your own Jon Stewart now.
Again, it’s funny that Stuever can keep two thoughts in his head at once: Stewart had no power to really change things, but his legacy is “You had the power all along.”
[Image of Stewart by Tony Rodriguez for the WashPost]
