Hard To Believe
But CNN.com has just run a commentary saying that Jon Stewart should just sit down and be funny. It was originally written for The Hollywood Reporter, and I’m sure it’s just coincidence that CNN, home of Crossfire, decided to run it on their site.
Here’s a graph to which I particuarly wanted to respond:
“Stewart might be biting the hand that feeds him, annoying the same media-elite crowd whose enthusiasm for “The Daily Show” has helped give him the platform he now enjoys.”
Stewart has not been given the platform he now enjoys because the “media-elite” crowd were enthusiastic about the show. It was because of people like me, who were being driven mad by the so-called legitimite medias inability or refusal to do their job.
People who recoil at part-weasel, part-inhuman monsters like Tucker Carlson being feted, at Robert “Douchebag of Liberty” Novak’s evasion of justice, at James Carville’s posing and preening. People who perceived that in Stewart there was a guy who was saying what most of us could see, but virtually nobody else was talking about. Somebody who calls bullshit bullshit.
It’s like more than one person has said about Michael Moore. If we had anything like a competent press in this country, a film like “F-9/11” would not have been nearly as incindeary, since most of it is made up of materials that were already on the public record.
But the broadcast and cable networks have completely abdicated their responsibility. To the point where Dan Rather swears allegiance to George W. Bush on national television and refuses to apologize for giving him the benefit of the doubt. Even in the march to war. Even though the very definition of a reporter’s job is not to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, no matter how powerful they are. To say (to steal the title of another fallen star’s book) “Hold On, Mr. President!”
And so it is left to people like Mr. Stewart and Mr. Moore to sift through the pieces and say this is how they fit together, it appears to us. I would much rather have Moore’s aggresively partisan point of view or Stewart’s equal-opportunity (but still honest) satire than the hypocritical point of view that pretends to be no point of view at all.
If the broadcast and cable networks have a problem with that, I heartily encourage them to start doing a better job. And until they do, they can keep chattering at each other until the monkeys come down from the trees.
Me, I’ll be over here watching Jon Stewart.
