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Notes -
What are your favorite examples of individuals spitting absolute truth on camera?
Whether about politics, oppression, anything.
Stephen Colbert correspondents dinner: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IJ-a2KeyCAY
Jon Stewart in Crossfire: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE
Both of these men have largely become more vanilla, but these clips really highlight their young brilliance.
I dont know how anyone can watch that crossfire clip and think Jon Stewart comes off well. All he's doing is his classic "clown nose on, clown nose off" routine where he takes jabs at people then retreats behind his comedy the second he recieves the mildest pushback.
Even if that was his debate tactic, his point came off quite clearly. His point being, shows like Crossfire and pundits like Tucker Carlson are harming political discourse in America. It’s a debate style the hosts were not accustomed to and I think it works to good effect.
Stewart's famous crossfire clip seems more a strong demonstration of the difference between statements said and points made. He made a lot of statements about 'spin alley', and 'the absurdity of the system', and lacking 'moral outrage', and he came on with the whole concept of 'nerf crossfire'. But both hosts denied them, and Stewart had no serious evidence or support for his claims beyond common knowledge; he didn't even provide serious support beyond reiterating over and over that the CNN staff can't complain about him not doing even a trivial effort.
The actual point he made was that Crossfire made a mistake: they trusted him. Which still says something interesting! But it's something rather different.
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His point was a rhetorical masterstroke at the time, and continued to be for a few years after... right up until it became evident where his proposed alternative led. He and the philosophy he's advocating in that clip has done orders of magnitude more to hurt America than either of the men he criticized ever could.
Can you expand on what philosophy you think he's advocating for? My takeaway is he was advocating returning to a time where politics wasn't treated as entertainment or reality TV. Shows like Crossfire have a financial incentive to treat politics as a battle royale, a sporting event, to keep their viewers eyeballs glued to the screen. This has made it more difficult for politicians to have rational conversations and rational debates, because everything is spun and amped up and taken out of context. Politics doesn't need to be a form of entertainment or culture war; it can be a boring, grinding process, whereby serious people make serious decisions about the future of America.
I think about this pretty frequently. It's unfortunate in the US that today's politicians are those who look good or are entertaining on TV. We used to have scholars leading the country, men like Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, or Thomas Jefferson. Whatever these men's faults were, they were incredibly intelligent writers and thinkers. They made their bones via fighting in war or through consistent and intelligent writing. Today's political landscape has been so changed by TV and social media, it seems impossible to return to that style of politician.
Anyway, that's a bit beside the point, but I am curious how you think Jon Stewart's political advocacy has harmed America more than Tucker Carlson's.
Crossfire treated politics as a battle royale. Stewart and his acolytes normalized politics as a joke, and the idea that the other side might have a valid argument as a punchline. They were extremely influential, to the point that many Progressives appear to have gotten a significant amount of their political news through the filter of their shows, and by claiming to be comedians they excused themselves from any expectation of using their influence responsibly. They were instrumental into solidifying Progressivism into an echo-chamber, with Stewart's morally- and intellectually-bankrupt "punching up" philosophy being a significant contribution to the Great Awokening. Their entire careers were spent dumping gasoline on the culture war, culminating in John Oliver's promotion of Trump as a Republican Presidential candidate.
Today's political landscape has been changed by TV and social media. Stewart and his acolytes are personally responsible for some of the largest and worst of those changes.
One note I'd give was that Stewart claimed Crossfire was less a battle royale, but literally "pro wrestling". I can't find the original "NERF Crossfire" gag on Comedy Central's site or YouTube, and it wasn't even a full section, but the main joke was about mainstream media lobbing softball interview questions at a variety of powerful people. "Spin alley" is a dated reference now and was failing in its original sense even in the 2000s, but it had since turned into the broader field where every head-to-head discussion would get recontextualized into a victory by its partisans.
"Where's your moral outrage on this?"
And there's a steelman where this was kinda true! The formalization of interview processes meant that anyone with a reputation for crushingly hard questions would never get to interview anyone of substance again. Especially high-profile politicians would get a handful of (ingratiating) personal questions built to humanize them, and at most a couple (sometimes pre-vetted!) softball policy ones, nearly as a rule. Rarely, you'd see absolute nobodies or politicians on their way to retirement get embarrassed as a way to generate some heat, even 'hard-hitting' direct news was more interested in talking up . Outside of directly dealing with the powerful, shows like Crossfire favored a barrage of bloodless short interactions : look at this, or this, and there's a pretty constant pattern where the show was little more than point-riposte, never any serious engagement and always swaddled with cruft and removed from concrete assessments.
"The thing that I want to say is, when you have people on for just knee-jerk, reactionary talk..."
But then you look at the story closer, and Stewart was supposed to be promoting his book. Carlson and Begala looked ridiculous for a variety of reasons, but no small part of it is that they were trying to play straight man to a comedian who wasn't interested in that whole game. Asking what people's moral outrage doesn't even make sense: he was holding them to a fire that he didn't bother naming.
So you get stuff like this, instead, as the high point of The Daily Show. There's moral outrage, for sure! Absolutely the sort of political discussion that allows shots below the belt, with all that implies even for the trivial dorks, at least for the people Jon Stewart and his audience didn't like.
And yet, the exact same criticism Stewart brought against Crossfire applied to his own work, and to the not-featuring-after-crank-muppets conventional news media that increasingly aped him. Rather than dissolve the point-riposte of Crossfire, it simply let the riposte swallow all discussion -- no need to even state your own position in a way that might make a viewer uncomfortable.
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