I don’t know much about Hitchens, but he seemed ill at ease, and possibly a little drunk. It might have been better to just talk about Jefferson’s dick.
You can never win against the man with the mike.
That’s true in radio call-in shows, when questioning from the audience, or while being a guest on someone else’s talk show. You can’t win. If the guy controlling the mike wants to make you look stupid, he can. That’s what Stewart did. He didn’t do it with Trent Lott, though, and the interview came across completely differently.
Hitchens can both write and talk interestingly, even when spewing nonsense. And he has a sense of humor. That’s more than most defenders of the administration Stewart has on. I think Stewart was wrong in this case and I’m calling him on it.
He’s wildly inconsistent in interviews, and he’s especially bad in adversarial interviews. Which is weird, because he actually reads the books before the interview. I don’t think the problem is too little time; I think it’s that he’s always trying to decide whether to make a joke or not.
The Daily Show is wonderful, but keeps being half the show it could be mainly because it can never decide what level to pitch its humor and commentary at. I have to accept this, because of the age of its primary audience, but sometimes it just drives me crazy.
Do you really think he does? I mean, sometimes all four guests in the week will be authors, and sometimes their books are pretty damn huge.
It’s always been my belief—and i’m happy to be corrected if someone can demonstrate otherwise—that in most cases, the book is given to a research assistant or intern to read, and that person puts together a summary of the book, along with some good anecdotes or talking points for Stewart to bring up during the interview.
I disagree with those who say that Hitchens was sandbagged. He was given every opportunity to make his points and he made them better than any other Iraq war apologist I’ve heard recently. He came off sounding lame because his arguments were lame, not because Stewart went O’Riley on him.
I think that’s the case in most talk shows, but I’ve always been under the impression that Stewart does read the books of the people he’s going to interview. When he had a football player (?) on, Stewart admitted to not having read the book, which signified to me that he usually does. Plus – he just strikes me as the kind of guy who likes to have read the book, not just so he can know what he’s talking about in the interview, but because he thinks it’s interesting.
Robert Smith, formerly of the Minnesota Vikings, a smart dude, and the one of the only times I’ve seen a guest make Jon look foolish, rather than the other way around.
Stewart can be one of the best interviewers out there, but if he has a fault it’s that he uses the ‘it’s just a comedy show!’ angle too much to give him an unfair advantage. It goes like this: John makes a deadly serious point, maybe even raising his voice and attacking his guest. Sometimes at considerable length (there was a point in the Hitchens interview where John must have lectured for about 30 seconds straight - an eternity in a five minute interview). Then he asks the guest to respond to the point he’s making, and when the guest starts to speak John interrupts with a funny line, everyone laughs, and the guest’s point is derailed. Or if the guest comes back with a heated point of his own, he’ll get the, “WHOA? We’re just a little comedy show here!” schtick.
And it’s not just right-wing political guests he’s done that to. Sometimes he’ll get a movie star on who he doesn’t like, and he’ll just attack them mercilessly and then interrupt their own comebacks with jokes. Sarah Michelle Gellar springs to mind.
That said, by now I think everyone knows what to expect from going on the Daily Show. If Hitchens, or Steven Hayes, or some other guests he’s savaged want to step into his ring and try to duke it out with him when he holds the advantage, that’s their choice.
I find it interesting that Tucker Carlson, who was blindsided by John Stewart and rather viciously attacked when Stewart was on Crossfire, has asked to have him as a guest on his show to have a more civil debate of longer duration, and so far Stewart has refused. I think Stewart attacked Carlson unfairly, and possibly even torpedoed his career at CNN. You’d think the decent thing to do would be to at least give Tucker a chance to clear the air now that he has his own show on another network.
I like John Stewart a lot, and I think he’s one of the funniest men on TV, but he’s not a saint, a prophet, or the saviour of journalism. He’s got some flaws of his own.
As a minor side note, why is Hitchens an “apologist” ? Isn’t his stance that Saddam was one evil dude and should have been removed as far back as 1991 and the first Bush administration? At worst, Hitchens has formed an unpleasant allience of sorts with Bush43 because of a shared goal.
I agree with all your observations except this one: Stewart didn’t blindside or attack Carlson - he simply deflected Carlson’s established interview style. The same thing could happen on Stewart’s show if a guest looked at him in open contempt after one of his jokes and said “This is a serious topic; act like an adult”.
To understand Hitchens on Iraq, you have to realize that he made common cause with the Kurds a long, long time ago. At that time, Hitchens was still a man of the left, and the Kurdish plight was a rather popular left-wing cause. Saddam was, after all, a right-wing fascist tyrant. Hitchens went to the Kurdish region, made friends, learned first hand about the horrors they had been subject to, and became a rather vocal champion of their cause. That’s why he supported the Iraq war - on purely moral grounds. He was shocked when the left abandoned the cause and opposed the war. He’s fond of saying, “I never abandoned the left - the left abandoned me.”
Of course, his stupid and reductionist assumption—which you, unsurprisingly, seem to have taken on board without question—is that opposing the war in Iraq equates to “abandoning the cause,” whether it be the left-wing cause in general, or the cause of the Kurds in particular.
What air does Carlson need to clear? It sounds like that would be exactly the opposite of what you’re proposing: Jon would be giving legitmacy to the “dick” who was so unpleasant when he was on Crossfire. Is he any different on CNN?
Did anyone see a few weeks ago, when S. Colbert was doing the “live” shot from Times Square, that Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show was being advertised on the big screen behind Setphen?
I thought it was ironic that Tucker got 2 minutes of free advertisement on the Daily Show…
Of course, the Daily Show could give Carlson free advertising in every episode, and i doubt that most Daily Show watchers would be induced to turn on his program.
I subscribe to The Nation magazine, a bastion of true liberal press (not the vastly over-hyped one that conservatives claim dominates America), and periodically the magazine runs advertisements for FOX News. When they first started doing this, some Nation subscribers were up in arms, asking how a liberal magazine could run ads from such a conservative media outlet.
I was very proud of the Nation’s response. The editors said that they believed in free speech, and would accept advertising from anyone willing to pay, as long as it didn’t contravene any laws. They also said that they made very clear to FOX that the Nation’s editorial position on FOX would not change at all as a result of the advertisement, and the magazine reserved the right to be as harshly critical of FOX as it always had been in the past. And finally, they said that they trusted in the intelligence of their readers to make appropriate decisions about whether or not to watch FOX News.
Personally, i don’t know what the upside for FOX was of advertising in the magazine. Perhaps none, as the ads seem to have stopped after a few issues. But i was perfectly happy for The Nation to take money from FOX.