Jon Stewart and Journalism

October 21, 2009 by Jerry

On his nightly “fake” news program, The Daily Show, Jon Stewart often aims his satiric barbs at television news: at the broadcast networks for their breathless inflation of non-events, and at cable news for their extreme branded positions. Two of his favorite targets are Fox News for their conservative views and CNN for their overweening claims about being “the best political team on television.”

But Stewart’s assault on CNN last week went much deeper than their self-praise; he went right to the heart of one of journalism’s basic tenets: investigative pursuit. As the Huffington Post reported, Stewart showed video clips with, “several instances of CNN guests saying spurious things and introducing made-up statistics without being asked where their numbers came from or countered with facts.”

Look at the episode and you’ll see one of the video clips of Arizona Republican Senator John Kyl who, as Stewart set it up, “tried to slip a whopper past [CNN’s] John King.” When King responded by saying, “we’re out of time,” an appalled Stewart looked into the camera and shouted, “Out of time? The show is four [beeping] hours long!”

Another clip was of Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch who, as Stewart set it up, made “bold, slippery slope statements” to CNN’s Tony Harris. When Harris responded, “All right, let’s leave it there,” a further appalled Stewart leaned into the camera and shouted even louder, “No! Don’t leave it there! You have 24 hours in a day! How much time do you need?”

The Daily Show’s expert video editors then strung together a series of quick cuts of other CNN personalities—Wolf Blitzer, Gloria Borges, Rick Sanchez, Anderson Cooper, and Don Lemon—all parroting the same “Leave it there” phrase. Stewart came back on camera to punctuate the sequence by saying, “I guess that explains CNN’s new slogan, ‘CNN. Nobody leaves more there.’”

Underlying all the comedy was Stewart’s sharp protest that journalism in the 21^st Century has deteriorated to almost passive reportage; a far cry from the investigative pursuits made by CBS’s Walter Cronkite, Sixty Minutes’ Don Hewitt, and the New York Times’ William Safire, whose recent departures emphasized the vacuum they left in journalism.

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