Don’t remember anything off the top of my head. Like I said above, give it a couple of weeks, and one or two instances will show up. Cramer’s next, so that’s a likely one right there.
On Crossfire, most famously.
What responsibility is Stewart supposed to have?
Should he really be as responsible as people who call themselves journalist? It would be nice if journalist actually lived up to their responsibilities. Now there is apparently a need for comedians to act like responsible journalist. That’s asking too much from Stewart whether you like it or not. Just because he can be journalistic enough to expose hypocrites and frauds for ratings doesn’t mean he now has to start behaving like a journalist. That’s not his show and it never will be.
I’ve never seen him do it. He may joke with serious guests, but he is not evasive. He does not get cornered and then try to make a joke as you’re suggsting. I guarantee he will not do that with Cramer.
The one where he embarrassed Tucker Carlson? What responsibility did he avoid during that appearance?
What I’ve seen Stewart do a lot recently is this: he makes a comment, the guest says it is a good one, and then he comes back with a self-deprecating joke about it. No cite either.
I see him as a comedian who actually cares, and who is smart enough to understand a lot of the issues. A dope from Mars might be convinced that Colbert was real some of the time - I doubt there is even one TDS where Stewart doesn’t make his primary role as a comedian very obvious.
I think the reason people turned to him was that over much of the past 8 years the mainstream news media were scared of telling the truth, for fear of losing access. TDS had no access, and couldn’t be hurt. I think they invented the montage of clips showing talking points at work and showing politicians contradict themselves, which eventually got adopted by some real news outlets. Those are funny, but they are also important in showing what is really going on.
From the transcript
*this final statement avoids responsibility by inference (i.e. Stewart’s putatively a comedian hence no responsibility)
If anything, he jokes to defuse the situation, not avoid confrontation. You can tell when he knows someone’s feeding him a line, and he’ll provide a counterargument or two, but at some point, he respectfully backs down instead of getting mean-spirited or insulting. It’s not his job to convert his guest to his way of thinking, and while he’ll never apologize for his position, he will joke about his comedian status with his guest so it doesn’t appear that he simply has an agenda to promote. You’ll notice he’ll most often use the comedian trope when the audience is overtly hostile to his guest, so he brings the mockery back on himself instead of fueling the fire of ire that may exist among his fans there on the set. He also have only a brief window for the interview, so he’ll change topics not to avoid debate, but because he knows a circular rehasning of I think/You think will be a waste of airtime. He’s smart enough to know when not to belabor the point and move on to other topics.
That’s right, he has no responsibility to avoid. He’s a comedian. When you accuse him of “avoiding responsibility,” you’re saying he has some kind of journalistic responsibility in the first place. He does not, and he;s never made any pretense otherwise.
He’s not avoiding responsibility, but responsibility does exist on a continuum. He works on a comedy show. This is a fact. Tucker Carlson works on a news show. Another fact. The level of responsibility is different. This doesn’t mean Stewart absolves himself of all responsibility, but the type of show he has and the context in which it’s presented can’t simply be ignored. They work in two different realms and it’s disingenuous for Carlson to assert that Stewart’s level of responsibility is equal to his own. It’s not.
If Jon Stewart wanted to be a journalist there’s no doubt he not only could be but would be a good one. He is what he is by choice, and I’d call him less a comedian than a satirist or humorist.
What kills me is that he’s a satirist with a degree from William & Mary, which distinguishes him a bit from “real” newsmen like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Larry King, and “real political commentator/GOP power broker” Rush Limbaugh, none of whom graduated from college. (King at least has the excuse that he didn’t go- poor family/had to work/wanted to be a DJ/etc.; the other three flunked out.) While some of the greatest intellectuals never went to college either (Gore Vidal was on TV the other night droning on and on about why he never went), I seriously don’t think Beck/Hannity/Limbaugh departed because they felt it wasn’t up to their intellectual expectations.
It’s also worth pointing out, I think, that the Crossfire interview was really the first thing that brought Jon Stewart onto the national stage as someone who could simultaneously be funny and address serious issues. At the time of that interview (IIRC), he really was much more of a “just comedy” kind of guy, on a “just comedy” kind of show, than he is these days (mostly BECAUSE of the Crossfire thing). The show didn’t have access to the kind of guests it does now; they’d get candidates on occasionally, but the interviews really did tend more towards the pure comedy/fluff side (remember when they put people on McCain’s Straight Talk Express in 2004 and just asked him questions off Trivial Pursuit cards?).
After the Crossfire dustup, Stewart did start to become more of a poster boy for harder-hitting questions couched in comedy, mainly because I think he realized in that moment that a) conventional media was more broken than ever and b) people were very excited to have somebody countering that. It was certainly only after that point that he started having the occasional two-guest shows, with the first guest being a more straight-ahead, “serious” interview.
So, in a nutshell, at the time of the Crossfire event, Stewart was even lower down on the “responsibility spectrum” that ArchiveGuy mentioned. He really was just a comedian who had the audacity to keep attacking his targets when they were in the room (and he’s maintained a surprising amount of that).
There’s nothing putative about it, and your conclusion that The Daily Show is “really” serious is not accurate. Stewart did dodge the question in that, while he might not be “accountable” for asking Kerry serious questions, it doesn’t explain why he chose not to do so. It was a bad interview. On the other hand, his performance wasn’t any worse than the rest of the press and Carlson didn’t have an excuse for that.
Stewart isn’t really confrontational with politicians from either side who are guests on his show. He’s just as easy on guests like John McCain and Mike Huckabee as he is with John Kerry. His beef is much more with the television news media, and those are the people he’s more likely to confront.
The nastiest I saw him get was with some guy who gave him a Republican-themed gift for his toddler.
Do you remember who that was?
He was even civil/non hard hitting with Rick Santorum, and he was absolutely nice and complimentary to Zell Miller.
The time I remember most that he did ask what nobody else would was when Pervez Musharraf was guest. “Where’s Osama bin Laden?” (That was the night that DAILY SHOW had Musharraf and Larry King and other shows were on episode 308 of the Anna Nicole Smith saga.)
Henry Bonilla, in regards to ‘Some people say… candidate X is the most liberal Y’ thing.
Carlson was focusing specifically on that interview but Stewart’s response was a generic disavowal of journalistic responsibility. Which is strictly speaking, true. Jon Stewart’s only a ‘comedian’.
Yes, he works on a comedy show. And Fox is a news channel. And Jerry Springer is a sincere relationship mediator. At some point, you can’t take stuff at face value, including the denotation of labels.
I’m not saying otherwise. Given his network, that won’t be his style. He usually goes “don’t you think it would be more fair if…” or “isn’t it odd that…”
Jester, he was well known before that. His focus on auditing the media and politics was present atleast since the 2000 elections. He just got even more ‘street cred’ after Crossfire.
Right. I objected to that answer, too, because like I said, it doesn’t actually explain why he did what he did in that particular interview. On the whole I’m not a believer in The Daily Show’s journalistic responsibility. They definitely air video clips or present information out of context sometimes to get bigger laughs because that’s their job.
Stewart did get somewhat tough with John McCain once, after his Liberty University speech. It was not a very aggressive grilling but it was clear that Stewart was very disappointed, which continued into the general election campaign.
McCain used to be on the show several times per year. I’ve wondered if he’s ever going to return after the Election coverage. OT1H, Stewart did lampoon him mercilessly, but OTOH, he reaches a younger and larger audience on TDS than he ever will on C-Span, and before 08 they were actually chums of a sort (I doubt they hung together off screen, but they were friendly on camera-). Besides, if Lynne Cheney can come on the program, anyone can.
My least favorite recurring TDS guest incidentally is Brian Williams. He seems way too full of himself and way too convinced of his own funniness.
Stewarts first responsibility is to make us laugh. If he can’t do that, it really doesn’t matter what his other responsibilities are.
What I love about the TDS, and what I wish actual news show would do, is they show us when these guys are lying to us. They show us when talking heads contradict themselves in previous sound bytes, as if these guys didn’t realize that recorded video\audio doesn’t vanish.