Last week marked the end of an era in American
television. Thank God!
It is not that I didn’t like John Stewart. It is not that I didn’t think he was
funny. I like him very much and thought
he was very funny, as well as smart and well informed. Even when I disagreed with his politics
(which was rather often) I still thought he was funny, intelligent and well
informed. Yet, somewhere along the line
I wasn’t able to enjoy watching the Daily Show.
It made me uncomfortable and not because of what was on the show.
The problem was not with John Stewart; the problem was with the
audience. Several years ago I started to
realize that people were taking the Daily Show more seriously that I was. I am glad that I didn’t hear it back in 2007 when
people started to talk about him as the most trusted man in America. That was what I felt when I watched the show
with others or talked to them about it. He was more than just a comedian; he
was important.
He is a smart man, and he wants to do good. But he was not a news man, and he was not a
politician. He was a comedian. His method of pointing out stupidity and
hypocrisy was entertaining and even sometimes enlightening. That however should not be mistaken for a
serious contribution to political or social debate. His jokes were sound bites, one liners. No matter how clever or truthful they are,
they simply spread and even magnify the superficiality and lack of thought and
reflection that characterizes public debate in the US.
He can point out people’s faults, and that is useful. He even did so in an entertaining way, but
there is so much more that needs to be done.
In addition to calling people out for hypocrisy and stupidity, we need
to analyze what the roots of the problems are.
We need to think deeply and carefully about the issues and the faults in
the way that the politicians and other public personas deal with (or simply
talk about) them.
Exposing what someone did or said that was wrong or stupid
is only a first step. Then the hard work
of finding explanations needs to start, after that new ideas and new plans need
to be developed. Yet, most of Stewart’s
audience made the assumption that because someone was called out as stupid or a
hypocrite that meant that the opposition must be right, must be better. That in itself is stupid. But when your discourse is based on entertainment
and sound bites; that is the assumption that is made.
Granted, Stewart was not much worse than most of the news
media in these respects. News in general
has become a form of entertainment: fast paces, thoughtless, superficial,
filled with sound bites and fury. This
is something that Neil Postman talked about already more than two decades ago:
“But what I am claiming here is not that television is
entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for
the representation of all experience…. The problem is not that television
presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is
presented as entertaining…” -- Neil Postman from Amusing Ourselves To Death
Before I ever read Neil Postman, I saw in the world what
Postman was talking about. It is not
that Stewart is an entertainer, it is that everything is becoming entertainment
and that the audience is embracing that as something of value. Stewart was more entertaining than regular
news, therefore it must be more important and trustworthy.
No comments:
Post a Comment