The Jon Stewart Enigma

I'm not sure I know what to make of Jon Stewart anymore.

His message of restoring "sanity," which I took to mean restoring civility and fact-based argumentation, resonated with me and clearly hit a chord with plenty of others. And anyone who has watched his show and followed some of his extracurriculars knows Jon as something of a media critic. His most famous moment was the day he went on CNN's Crossfire in 2004, ostensibly to promote America: The Book, and tore into what he viewed as the triviality and partisanship of the way the program was run ("You're hurting America," he told them):



At the time, and to some extent still today, I agreed with his underlying message that Crossfire utterly failed in getting its guests off their prepared talking points and thus arguably there was no "real" dialogue. Certainly I agree that it would be nice if people--important people, no less--could sit and have a genuine discussion. And to some extent Crossfire's hosts were guilty of not holding the feet of politicians who appeared on the show to the fire, as the hosts themselves traded partisan barbs. But the reality, it seems to me, is that even if you have a relatively adversarial host who explicitly calls out a politician for sticking to talking points like a broken record, it doesn't matter.

For example, on election night a few weeks ago, Chris Matthews checked in on uberpartisan Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, who had just been re-elected. In a previous appearance on Matthews' show Hardball, Bachmann had suggested that someone (the media?) ought to investigate Congressional Democrats for anti-Americanism, an idea that many thought came dangerously close to outright McCarthyism. So when Matthews talked to Bachmann on election night, he came right out and asked her if she intended to launch investigations into anti-Americanism now that Republicans had taken control of the House. Her canned answers were completely unrelated to his questions, to the point that it didn't feel like an interview at all. Which led to this amusing question from Matthews:



But back to the point. When Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear a few weeks ago, the response from many left-leaning media personalities wasn't particularly positive. The hosts of MSNBC's primetime shows bristled at being compared to their counterparts at Fox News, viewing the juxtaposition as a false equivalence. And Bill Maher used part of the "New Rules" segment of his HBO show to say what I think many people were feeling about the rally:



Stung by the criticism from the left, Jon asked for some time last week to sit down and explain himself in an interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. The uncut interview (50 minutes long) can be viewed here: The Interview. It's worth watching if you have the time because it's both interesting and surprising.

He says a lot of things in this interview that make very little sense to me. And some that outright contradict each other. As an example, Maddow and Stewart discuss an issue that has sprung back into the spotlight with the publication of Bush's new book: did the former President authorize torture, sometimes phrased as "is Bush a war criminal?" This is back in the news because in his book Bush explicitly admits to personally and enthusiastically authorizing waterboarding:

In George W. Bush's new memoir, Decision Points, the former president explains that the CIA approached him about the possibility of waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda operative often called "the architect of 9/11." In his memoir, Bush writes that his response was "Damn right." This seems to be a straightforward admission that Bush approved the use of waterboarding on a detainee--even though this technique is widely regarded as inhumane, and its use is thought by many to violate the United Nations Convention Against Torture, of which the United States is a signatory. (In media outside the U.S., waterboarding is almost always referred to as torture.)

I'm actually not sure why this is being viewed as a revelation; everyone knew that the U.S. has waterboarded detainees. I suppose we didn't know for sure that Bush had personally signed off on it? Well, if we didn't know before, we know now. And so the issue seems to have become very simple: is waterboarding torture? If yes, then a crime was committed here. The current Attorney General has said that waterboarding is torture, it does seem to be a fact that the U.S. charged at least one WWII-era Japanese officer as a war criminal for waterboarding someone, a great many experts inside and outside the U.S. seem to feel it constitutes torture, and prior to 2002 the prevailing opinion in America seemed to be that waterboarding is torture. So with that background established, I've clipped the relevant portion of the interview:



The first thing that sort of made me do a double-take was Jon's statement to Rachel "You've said Bush is a war criminal. Now that may be technically true...". He starts off by conceding her point but chastises her for having the audacity to make it because it "feels like a conversation stopper." I fully agree with him that such a statement sounds incendiary. But this is where I think Jon's message gets a bit hazy. Does restoring sanity and civility mean ignoring the truth content of a statement? A statement like "Obama is a Marxist" doesn't satisfy the definitions of sanity and civility because it's nonsensical: there is no valid argument you can make in support of that statement. Put simply, you have to either 1) be unfamiliar with the tenets of Marxism or 2) be unfamiliar with the policies Obama has pursued or is pursuing to believe it. Either way, making that statement constitutes a massive breach of what one might consider to be the requirements of civilized discourse. It's not the style, it's the substance that sinks it.

In the case of "Bush is a war criminal," you have to believe three things: 1) Bush authorized waterboarding, 2) waterboarding is a form of torture, and 3) torture constitutes a war crime. The first one is not in doubt, since the man wrote a book boasting about that very thing. Regarding the third, I'm certainly not a lawyer so I'm not sure what domestic federal law says on the subject, but as signatories to things like the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention Against Torture, I believe the U.S. (and, ultimately, the world community) has made its feelings clear on this issue. So it really hinges on the second point, which as I've indicated has lots of evidence in its corner that waterboarding is indeed a form of torture. And, just as an aside, if you're having trouble remembering exactly what it is that the former President signed off on:

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

So while Jon's right that the charge is incendiary, accusations that Bush is a war criminal don't seem to be based on false premises, nor are the arguments particularly weak. And while this seems to have emerged as a partisan issue, I don't think the fundamentals of the debate itself are partisan. Certainly the current President took a very Gerald Ford-ian approach of letting bygones be bygones. Did the last guy do something illegal? Eh, better not to ask the question, let's move on.

But let's get back to Jon's point. And I'm torn because I'm sympathetic to his "you're not helping" views. He seems to have in mind groups like Code Pink, which engage in silly publicity stunts to make their point. Certainly I agree that getting thrown out of a Congressional committee room by shouting about Bush's potential war crimes is a waste of time. In college, I was frequently annoyed by the antics of liberal student groups. When a group trying to force the university to divest any holdings that might somehow make it into Darfur crashed a university Board of Trustees meeting I took a Stewartian "you're not helping" point of view. Efforts to bar Coke products from campus in order to make some point about labor conditions in South America seemed pointless to me. Causes for the sake of causes never appealed to me, nor have antics for the sake of antics. So in that sense, Jon is right about the importance of style and certainly the effort to restore sanity entails stylistic changes to the way arguments are presented.

But this is exactly where many on the left took issue with him (and you can see this in Bill Maher's clip above). He conflates statements that are incendiary on the basis of their substance (e.g. that Obama is a socialist or Marxist or whatever) and pushed by a wide range of leaders in modern conservative/Republican thought (including political leaders), with arguments that are not incendiary--in the sense of "we don't have an argument here but are just trying to egg on the other side"--on the substance (e.g. by authorizing an apparent torture technique, Bush may well have committed war crimes) and have been suggested by all manner of sober legal scholars and relatively civil voices on the left (like Maddow). And he does this because a handful of groups on the left have chosen to make the point in an obnoxious way. And whether or not he wants to admit it, Jon is pushing a very serious false equivalence with that kind of thinking.

And he brushes off the accusation against the former President--after suggesting it "may technically be true"--by saying that, to him, a war criminal is Pol Pot or the guys convicted in the Nuremburg Trials. In other words, a war criminal isn't someone who knowingly and purposefully engages in actions that violate the established rules of war, it's someone who commits genocide. I can't get behind that, Jon. He suggests that if we're going to go down that road, we might have to ask whether Obama is some kind of war criminal for continuing the Bush-era policies of "extraordinary rendition," i.e. knowingly shipping prisoners off to more torture-friendly countries. And while I think there's a much less straight line case for actual criminality there, by all means let's talk about it. It seems a bit disingenuous to push the idea that we're in trouble because "tribal" politics colors everyone's perceptions, and then make that kind of argument in support his case--"well, we can't pursue that thread because then we'd have to consider the possibility that Obama has done something wrong." Sorry, Jon, that's not an argument against going down that road. Not to someone who can see--as you claim to want people to do--beyond red and blue.

I realize I've spent an inordinate amount of time on that one issue. There's a lot more in there that I find a bit off, such as his holier-than-thou attitude on his own role in the media. When I say Jon's a "media critic," I mean he's a very specific kind of media critic: a critic of cable news. Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC are frequently the target of his ire but I don't believe he ever criticizes network news or newspapers. In general, he goes after shows based on commentary--what I think are the TV equivalent of newspaper columnists or editorialists. And that's fine, those people deserve to be skewered. But we shouldn't confuse them with "the news." Bill O'Reilly is not the news. Keith Olbermann is not the news. They report stories, sure, but they do so with their characteristically ideological bent. Bill O'Reilly actually puts up his thoughts on the screen in bullet points, a practice lampooned by Colbert in The Word.

No one tunes into these people expecting a straight news broadcast any more than they tune into The Daily Show for a straight news broadcast. They tune in for the show's particular bent. In the case of The Daily Show, we watch because Jon makes fun of the news, he puts his unique comedic spin on it. Liberals watch Olbermann for his liberal bent and O'Reilly for his conservative bent. Everyone knows what they're getting: a certain kind of commentary on the news. In that sense, The Daily Show is no different than that which it mocks. It's just that the mockery itself is the bent its viewers want to see.

Here's Jon (somewhat incoherently, I think) trying to argue that his show is special and he has "leeway" that others lack:



I don't buy it, in part because I'm not sure what he's trying to argue. None of them are "on the field" in the sense he seems to be using it, which roughly seems to be "actively working as an arm of a party." I don't even think Fox News generally meets that definition, though some of the folks over there came awfully close in the first half of 2009 with the way they promoted Tea Party meet-ups. They all clearly have preferences (this includes Jon) and they all approach the news with a point of view that they wear on their sleeves. But again, that's not a bug, that's a feature: that's why people tune in. It's not "what happened today?" it's "how is ___ going to handle what happened today?" People getting some of their primary news from those programs is undoubtedly happening but that's not the fundamental point.

What becomes clear at a certain point of this interview is that Jon takes issue with what he views as a motive-driven narrative: viewing the actions of politicians through the lens of what you perceive their motives to be. Thus the criticism of Bush as a possible war criminal becomes invalid because many adherents to that view are undoubtedly fitting it into their core belief that Bush is a bad or evil man. And while I don't think there's any way to get rid of that kind of thinking, I don't think it's particularly relevant here. It doesn't matter if Bush's motives were relatively pure, as he suggests they were: everything he did, he did to protect American citizens. Invading Iraq, authorizing waterboarding, tapping phones, and so on. But to pretend that opposition to those policies is somehow invalid because the dissent has in some instances been overly shrill or rooted in an odd belief that Bush is some kind of second coming of Hitler is disingenuous. And by that I mean that the claim that these policies are bad for American has merit, regardless of whether the person making that argument believes it simply because he believes in his heart that Bush is a bad man. You can believe he was wrong, even criminally so, and still accept his claim that his motives were pure.

Let me illustrate this with a contrast. I have a good friend who, during the 2008 election season, took issue with some of candidate Obama's policy preferences because of some deep-seated suspicion of the years Obama spent overseas as a child. In the same vein, I've seen opposition to the Affordable Care Act that's rooted in the fact that in 2003 Obama told a room of union folks that he's a proponent of single-payer. These are part of a larger pattern that I would characterize thusly: Obama is different somehow, he's some kind of "other," either due to one's suspicion about the church he went to, or his "real" religious beliefs, or his years overseas, or his racial background, or the way these intersect with his alleged closet socialist or even Marxist beliefs. And because one believes that in his heart Obama has an unacceptable world view (be it in terms of religion, or economics, or culture, or all of the above), every policy he supports must be viewed through that prism, regardless of the independent merits or failings of the policy itself. Thus it's irrelevant that a dispassionate look at the ACA--er, "ObamaCare"--would confirm that its design does not lead anywhere close to single-payer health care (indeed, as I've pointed out, the design itself came from 1990s era Republicans)--since we "know" that Obama wants to take over every aspect of your life, it stands to reason that a health care law he supported must pave the way to whatever your worst nightmare happens to be.

In the war criminal example, believing that Bush is inherently a bad man with bad motives isn't necessary to make the argument, it will simply reinforce the conclusions that I believe a dispassionate analysis yields: these policies are not a good idea and quite possibly criminal. But when it comes to Obama, a deep-seated paranoia about the man himself is necessary to buy the arguments being presented because the facts themselves don't lead to those conclusions. These are not equivalent situations, no matter how hard Jon wants to strive to appear "fair." So when he makes these arguments, as well as arguments that it's just a "belief" that Saddam Hussein wasn't actually creating weapons of mass destruction, he leaves me scratching my head. Perhaps I'm missing the point he's trying to make because, as I said at the start, I don't know what to make of the guy anymore. Civility does not mean--as it does in the non-partisan, non-opinionated media that Jon doesn't attack--presenting bullshit as being on par with rational, fact-based analysis. If the failing of cable news personalities is that they have too much of a point of view, the failing of the dispassionate media is that it doesn't have enough of one. Instead we have news articles telling us that critics say X, while the White House or whoever responds with Y. Well, that's nice but it doesn't leave the average citizen with any means by which to evaluate the truth of X or Y. And thus they're forced to rely on partisan affiliations or their gut or chicken bones to pick a side. I don't know how to reconcile my own view that some statements, some points of view are just laughably devoid of facts or content--a view I feel is implicitly shared by The Daily Show in much of their tongue-in-cheek humor--with Jon's statements here.

And that's part of the enigma of Jon Stewart: what is he trying to do? What point is he trying to make? If it's just satire, I have to admit I think Colbert's show has been light years ahead of The Daily Show for years (virtually since Stephen left). If, as Wiki says, "In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement" then Colbert, by doing each and every show in character, as a false persona representing an amalgam of right-wing blowhards, takes the cake here. His humor is more biting, the heights of ridiculousness he reaches using conservative arguments and tactics are well beyond anything The Daily Show does these days, and just in terms of entertainment value Colbert has always been a better performer than Jon himself (Colbert's roots in Second City's brand of improv comedy serve him much better in this respect than Jon's background in stand-up serve him). In terms of sheer hilarious comedy with biting points to make about society, Colbert wins.

The Daily Show, I think, has to be viewed more as another version of that which it claims to parody: news shows with a point of view. Their point of view is expressed through comedy, but then many times so is Rachel Maddow's (in fact, in the interview she laments that now her attempts to use comedy to talk about politics come across now as a poor rendition of Jon Stewart's shtick). Despite Jon's protestations in this interview that even his own term for his show--fake news--isn't correct and that he's really just attempting to pull of his own version off a Jerry Seinfeld routine, it seems clear that his goal is to comment on the news in his unique style, which as a comedian obviously revolves around humor. This differs a bit from Colbert, I think, who is so dedicated to his satirical craft that he not only spoke at the 2006 White House Correspondents dinner in character to make fun of both the media and the President (to his face) but actually testified in front of a Congressional committee in character a few weeks ago. Again, if it's a question of which one is the kid blowing spitballs at the powerful for the sheer fun and comedy of it all, Colbert wins hands down (particularly when one reflects on the interviews--with a few exceptions--Jon has done with the people he lambasts).

Anyway, I found that interview perplexing. Take from it what you will.

edit// I realize I wanted to make some point about the history of partisan newspapers and the like in America to push back on Jon's implicit suggestion that the Era of Good Feelings lasted up until a few years ago when red-and-blue maps and nasty partisanship re-emerged from the dustbin of history. But maybe TJ or one of you can somehow relate those kinds of things to the topic at hand.