The end of Jon Stewart’s sixteen-year run as host of The Daily Show on Thursday got relatively little media coverage.
The reason for this is that the entire country was tuned in to FOX News for the first Republican presidential debate … featuring Donald J. Trump.
The irony, if not the poetic justice, cannot be lost on Stewart. After all, more than other public figures, he made Republican politicians and the conservative journalists at FOX News the butt of jokes.
Nonetheless, it speaks volumes about the role he played — as pope of the liberal news media — that so many Democratic politicians, liberal journalists, and A-list celebrities marked the occasion by singing his praises. Never mind that virtually all of them did so in videotaped messages because they were tuned in to that debate too. This proves that they subjected themselves to his prosecutorial wit over the years more to curry favor with his young audience (for votes, ratings, or receipts) than to kiss his … ring.
Indeed, one of the top-trending memes on Stewart’s retirement pertained to the prevailing view that millions of young people watched his show as their only source of news and information.
I’ve always found this stupefying, even dismaying. Not least because I watched The Daily Show (hint: on Comedy Central) too, but only for the same reason I watched The Late Show with David Letterman: to be entertained, not to be informed … about anything.
Which is why I say – to any brain-dead parasite now wondering who will feed him the “news” the way Stewart did – try reading the news yourself. Not only will you be more informed; you might even be a little entertained.
Mind you, he always presented himself more as media and political critic than news and entertainment reporter. This explains why he felt outraged enough to invite hundreds of thousands to Washington, DC, in 2010 for a “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.”
As it happens, the following from his sermon on the Mall crystallizes the kind of criticism that drove his show:
The country’s 24-hour, political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder… If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.
(The Nation, October 30, 2010)
But I’m obliged to note that Stewart often contributed to the “conflictination” he criticized. In fact, no less a media standard-bearer than the New York Times bade him farewell with a feature article (on August 7), which criticized his sanctimony and hypocrisy in equal measure.
Here, in part, is how it read:
Mr. Stewart, who signed off from The Daily Show on Thursday … trained his liberal-leaning audience to mock hypocrisy, incoherence and stupidity, and could have nudged them to see the planks in their own eyes, too. Instead, he cultivated their intellectual smugness by personifying it.
Ouch!
Not to mention the damning insights one White female audience member and one Black male staffer have now provided into the character of this media pontiff. They revealed how Stewart hurled a barrage of profanities at them for daring to question why his show was peddling racist and other forms of plainly offensive humor.
Here is how Salon carried (on April 9, 2014) audience member Alison Kinney’s description of what happened when Stewart came out to welcome his “mostly White” audience before taping, but after a White comic had “warm[ed] up the crowd [with a slew of] racist and misogynist jokes:”
I asked why a Daily Show warm-up targeted African-Americans and a woman in a wheelchair. Stewart’s face creased with annoyance. He said, shortly, loudly, glaring at me, ‘BECAUSE. IT’S. FUCKING. FUNNY.’
And here is how the New York Times reported (on July 24, 2015) on what happened when staffer Wyatt Cenac dared to admonish Stewart that the racism one of his bits perpetuated far outweighed its comedic value:
In the podcast, Mr. Cenac described events at The Daily Show in 2011, after Mr. Stewart did an on-air impression of Herman Cain, a Black business executive who was seeking the 2012 Republican nomination for president.
Mr. Cenac compared Mr. Stewart’s impersonation to the Kingfish, a racially stereotyped character from The Amos ’n’ Andy Show, and said it struck him as ‘a little weird’…
When Mr. Cenac later tried to discourage Mr. Stewart in a staff meeting from pursuing a further segment … Mr. Cenac said the host ‘kept shutting me down [and] then he got upset and he stood up,’ adding that Mr. Stewart shouted expletives at him several times.
Significantly, at the time of this professional humiliation, Cenac was the only Black writer on The Daily Show. He left the following year, claiming in his podcast that, after being so racially and professionally disrespected, he “never felt comfortable” there.
This … demonstrates the insidious entitlement White liberals have been granted — by politically compromised Black leaders — to make all kinds of racial jibes with impunity; so long as those White liberals are celebrated supporters/members of the Democratic Party.
(“Hillary: Republicans Treating Democrats like Slaves,” The iPINIONS Journal, January 23, 2006)
Things that make you go, hmmmm, no?
To be fair, given these accounts, it speaks volumes about Stewart’s character that Cenac returned on Thursday, along with other former staffers like Steven Colbert, John Oliver, and Larry Wilmore who have become famous in their own right, to pay homage to him. To say nothing of the fact that Stewart blessed Black South African comic Trevor Noah to replace him as host.
Incidentally, I’ve seen enough of Noah’s performances to believe that he can have as much success replacing Stewart as Jimmy Fallon has had replacing Jay Leno; certainly as much as British imports John Oliver and James Corden have had in similar circumstances. This, notwithstanding that network executives will expect twice as much of the Black Noah than his White counterparts … if you know what I mean.
All in all, though, I commend Stewart for his trailblazing and entertaining contributions to the social criticism and public debate I toil in. I wish him well in his future endeavors, which I gather will include directing iconoclastic movies – as professionally typecasting as that might be.
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