Opinions

The media's watchmen

In print | March 19, 2009

This past Thursday marked a watershed moment in the history of television news. It wasn’t necessarily the interview itself, between “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer of CNBC’s “Mad Money”; neither was it the fact that an ostensibly irreverent comedy show got so much coverage after the fact by “serious” news networks; nor, even, was it that Stewart definitively exposed this classification as a ridiculous and malicious fallacy. The importance of Thursday’s interview can be summed up in Stewart’s brief send-off to his audience: “I hope that was as uncomfortable to watch as it was to do.” It was that Stewart’s show, to put it succinctly, had balls.

This lack of journalistic, er, courage, has come to define the television news industry. Cramer and CNBC may have been the direct target of the “Daily Show” offensive, but only because their offenses were the most obvious, and, in light of the financial crisis about which they got almost nothing right, the most egregious. The larger problem is that their mistakes — failing to ask the hard questions of businesses and executives; failing to see beyond cursory examinations of stock prices and dividends into the deeper flaws of the economy; failing, in the case of Cramer, to predict the total collapse of a financial giant like Bear Sterns (in fact pleading with investors to buy Bear stock within months of its downfall) — are part of a malignant trend that has long since metastasized to stations covering other types of news. The trend is of fusing the news business with the entertainment business — only maybe the former has been swallowed up by the latter.

In a 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” communications theorist Neil Postman argued that television would destroy reasoned political discourse. As a medium, it is better suited to thirty-second sound clips and slogans than to the logical, structured, detailed arguments of the pen or podium. Indeed, the state of modern television news illustrates that there is more to Postman’s argument than simple Luddism. The modern newscaster is better trained in speech delivery and teleprompting than in actual reporting, and agencies choose their lead anchors by carefully calculating their “trustability” (middle-aged male WASPs consistently get the best ratings, go figure). That FOX News can boast of being the most popular cable news channel should confirm our suspicions; that “The O’Reilly Factor” can boast of being its most popular show, even more so.

Every time I walk into my local YMCA lounge I am confronted with an O’Reilly or a Hannity on the large, prominent flatscreen. Coming from a rural, conservative area that strongly identifies with the traditional, “family values” ethic, I realize there is more to these pundit’s popularity than their sheer entertainment value. But consider, for a second, the aesthetic feel of any given show on FOX, or on MSNBC, its liberal analog.

They begin with the flourishing of computer graphics and the trumpeting of theme songs. We are confronted with a host, or hosts, who read 20-second blurbs about such critically important stories as “Paris Hilton in Prison” off a prompter. The actual amount of screen space has been shrinking steadily for years, due to increasingly prominent and flashy borders, tickers, logos and slogans that wrap the show in a bright, colorful glow. At some point, the host may welcome a guest for an interview or debate. Often (as on CNBC), the guest is asked penetrating questions like: “So, how does it feel to be a billionaire?” Or, at the other extreme (typical of FOX shows like “The O’Reilly Factor”), the guest functions as a radical, less-than-intellectual straw man, easily torn to pieces by the courageous, patriotic, blue-collar host.

But I am tackling a stale argument. Stephen Colbert’s popular “Colbert Report” already functions as a pastiche of the news industry’s fetish with entertainment, egoism and staunch Americo-centrism. If there is any precedent for Jon Stewart’s not-really-so-comedic skewering of Jim Cramer, it is Colbert’s not-really-so-comedic critique of the Bush administration in his infamous speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006. Interestingly enough, mainstream television news networks took criticism at the time for focusing their coverage on other aspects of the dinner and paying little attention to Colbert’s speech.

So, somehow we have come to the point where two self-labeled comedians are able to make much more pointed and even more serious criticisms of pressing issues than any other personality on television news. It might be going too far to suggest that “South Park,” another Comedy Central show, engages in this same serious criticism — but Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic did just this in his blogged response to the Stewart debate. Surely, herein lies a very troubling philosophical statement about contemporary media culture, or perhaps simply contemporary culture in general.

Still, we can take something heartening away from the “Daily Show” debate. The fact is, the interview with Jim Cramer really was difficult to watch — at points painfully, cringingly so. The idea that we watched an irreverent comedy show despite this means that we are still capable of valuing true, informational journalism over pure entertainment. Maybe the “serious” news shows should take a hint.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show,” of course.

David is a first-year. You can reach him at dstern1@swarthmore.edu.