Jon Stewart recently sat down with Rachel Maddow in order to defend himself against criticisms from all over the left, including here, that the Rally to Restore Sanity essentially served as a huge banner of false equivalence. Particularly stinging was Bill Maher's criticism, saying "If you’re going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you might as well go ahead and make it about something."
Jay Rosen posted his own commentary about the interview in YouTube form, along with the full interview, Bill Maher's clip, and an old Daily Show takedown of CNN's false equivalence here. All the videos are well worth watching. I just wanted to highlight two points that Jay found very interesting which relate back to a lot of what I love about his own work: 1) Jon felt the need to come and defend himself because he wants a news system that focuses not on the left/right, Dem/GOP, blue/red fight, but the conflict between, as Jay put it, corruption and virtue. 2) Jon stresses to Rachel over and over that he is on the sidelines and is thus different from Rachel, and she fights him on it.
1) Jon's vision of the news is interesting. As Jay explained, by "corruption," Jon doesn't just mean finding $90k in a Congressman's freezer (though that's included), but basically, calling bullshit where he sees it, and siding with the truthful over the liars on all sides of political debate. Jay included the old TDS clip to point out that this is a genuine feeling - Jon doesn't and didn't mean to encourage false equivalence - he really wants this change. I agree. I mentioned in my first two posts on the topic that I was particularly disappointed because Jon Stewart is someone that doesn't do this often. Incidentally, this distinction - calling bullshit versus the current journalistic conception of "balance" is the whole ballgame. It's what Jay writes about when discussing the "View From Nowhere" and intellectual honesty as part of the definition of good journalism. It's what Kovach and Rosenstiel wrote about in their book "The Elements of Journalism," when they described the original understanding of "objectivity" to be akin to the scientific method. Start from neutrality, then determine the truth. However, while Jon definitely wants that, he missed the mark pretty badly. As Jay put it in the comments:
Well, if you don’t point out any asymmetry and you do criticize both sides, you are going to leave the impression of equivalence. I think Stewart was relying on familiarity with his show, which certainly ridicules Fox more than any other player, to supply the antidote to false balance. But another way to put it is that he couldn’t figure out a way to get that asymmetry into the rally, so he just blew it off.He simply gave into the temptation, since that is how you gain credibility in the crazed "liberal bias" based media world.
Incidentally, there's a basic problem with Jon's dream here, and that is that the right is much more nutty right now, so if you come in calling bullshit all the time, you basically sound like Jon Stewart, or I'd say even Rachel Maddow. (Jon charges her with being too easy on the left, but she criticizes them when they spin bullshit too.) In other words, you get called a partisan. In the current media climate, you just have to accept that. Jon understands this, as he pointed out in the interview that not only has Fox become naked advocacy/opinion journalism, but they've created a sense of persecution so any criticism of them is "liberal bias." However, I don't think Jon realizes the consequence of that fact for the media he'd like to see, namely that his vision can't possibly happen, or if it did, it would be pretty liberal right now.
2) I think Rachel has the better of this argument. First, as Jay also pointed out, no one is on the sidelines any more, much less Jon Stewart, one of the most powerful political voices out there. He thinks of what he did, not asking people to even vote, is "staying on the sidelines," but really it's just taking a knee. He told Rachel that she's really in the game, but given the perception of what each does, they both have the same power. For him, he chooses not to exercise it, and for her, she has to stick to the ethics of the reporting profession - she never tells anyone how to vote, for example. Second, Rachel told Jon that even programmatically, what they do isn't that different. She pointed out that she occasionally makes jokes to point out the absurdities. She referred to a time after Bush v. Gore that Jon basically cleverly called Bush an idiot, and compared it to when she explained to the Tea Party (then Teabaggers) what teabagging meant. They're doing largely the same thing - they're both just calling bullshit. Even in Jon's ideal media that's what they would both be doing, only he'd be funny about it and she'd play it straight. Jon's consistently calling himself a comedian seems really to be his own version of the View from Nowhere, that he's just a critic on the outside with no skin in the game. That's just not true - he's pretty close to where Maddow is, and that's fine, because she's the best actual journalist on cable.
