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Notes -
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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