Jon's shtick on The Daily Show

by Manisha Verma

On Aug 20 2009, Jon Stewart interviewed Betsy McCaughey - architect of the widely rumored "death panels" idea - that Obama's health care proposals would create government sponsored draconian consultations imposing conditions upon both patients in end-of-life circumstances and doctors treating said patients to decide which patients were worthy of living. It turned out that the bill actually mandated life-sustaining procedures which were a far cry from demoniac death panels.  The tenet is similar in line with Bill Clinton's health care proposals which were defeated by similar conservative pundits, wherein Betsy was a prominent star icon with her publication of the 1994 health reform critique, rising subsequently to become lieutenant governor of the state of New York. Innuendo reports from angry speakers at town halls basically ideologically opposed to the president, and from anti-abortion conservatives who purport that Obama would pursue a pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda, combined with molded accounts of actual legislative proposals that would provide financing for optional consultations with doctors about “end of life” services, fueled the rumor to the point where it strictly overcame the real debate. After McCaughey's Daily Show appearance, James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly described her role in the healthcare debate as: "She has brought more misinformation, more often, more destructively into America's consideration of health-policy issues than any other individual. She has no concept of "truth" or "accuracy" in the normal senses of those terms, as demonstrated when she went on The Daily Show[1]. Betsy resigned from the board of directors of Cantel Medical Corporation the next day. To be fair to her, she might have had A point about the way the bill could be interpreted by doctors doing what the federal government deems cost-effective. That said, the interview went basically like this: McCaughey would say the bill said something, only it would turn out that different words were used, or that it actually wouldn't say that at all, and Jon Stewart would gently point this out, and she'd insist otherwise, and then start flipping through the whole bill contained in her binder, not really finding the proof or the documentation she was talking about. Stewart, at one point, contended that McCaughey's take on the matter was "hyperbolic" and "dangerous"[2]. When he meticulously picked her points apart and demonstrated their inaccuracy, the Columbia PhD who had admittedly spent a considerable worth of her lifetime researching the health care effort was left stumbling and stammering in an attempt to defend her position. By the end of it, he told her, "I like you -- but I don't understand how your brain works."[3]

Stewart has a knack for catching political luminaries in their inconsistencies. Forget the customary bout of montage videos that hallmarks The Daily Show's regular theme of sharply contrasting wry politics from leaders and media outlets publicizing one theme and critiquing it the next moment(or so it seems from the clips). In fact, bringing together random selections of news clips to showcase satirical stories of government caprice or policy contrariety in order to make the administration look ridiculous, could be held to an expected standard of the cultivated art form that Comedy Central's fake news channels employ. But Jon manages to rise past the agendas of his guests - conservatives and liberals alike - in the most ingratiating manner. When he peppered Bill Kristol - editor of Weekly Standard, a right-wing opponent of health care reform that includes a public insurance option - he even managed to steer him into complimenting government run health-care[4].

STEWART: So you believe no public option, so even though that's good enough for the military, not good enough for the people of America.

KRISTOL: Well, the military has a different health system than the rest of Americans.

STEWART: It's a public system, no?

KRISTOL: Yeah, they don't have an option, they're all in military health care.

STEWART: Why don't we go with that?

KRISTOL: I don't know. Is military health care really what you -- first of all, it's expensive. I think they deserve it, the military--

STEWART: But the American public do not.

KRISTOL: No. The American public do not deserve the same quality health care as our soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan deserve, and they need all kinds of things that the rest of us don't need.

STEWART: Well, no, they can have that level of care, but are you saying that the American public shouldn't have access to the same quality health care that we give to our better citizens?

KRISTOL: Yes. To our soldiers? Absolutely. The American public--

STEWART: Really?

KRISTOL: I think that if you become a soldier, you deserve....

.........

KRISTOL: One of the ways we make it up to the soldiers, since they're risking their lives, we give them first-class health care. The rest of us can go out and buy insurance--

STEWART: So you said that the public--

.........

STEWART: Get this on the record. Bill Kristol said that the government can run a "first class health care system." And a government-run health care system is better than the private health care system.

KRISTOL: I don't know if it's better.

STEWART: You just said that.

KRISTOL: I don't know if it's better.

STEWART: You said it was better! You said it's the best. It's a little more expensive...

KRISTOL: The military needs different kinds of health care...

STEWART: I just want to get this down: "The government runs the best health care."

Stewart wrapped up Kristol’s argument by stating, “So what you are suggesting is that the government could run the best health care system for Americans, but it’s a little too costly, so we should have the shitty insurance company health care.”

Its hard to miss that Stewart is a steadfast liberal, but he does give right-wing opponents a square and even-handed shot at debate, and the show is never about pushing his own liberal agenda. He let Mike Huckabee have a good shot at the pro-life issue (even though he smacked him on the gay-rights one). Both parties demonstrated civility at a time when dialogue on abortion has become inflammatory, as Stewart noted. "I hope that people begin to see that both sides can come at it with good faith and good intentions and are not frenzied and maniacal on one side and callous and indifferent on the other," said Stewart, who identifies more with the pro-choice camp but admitted he's in "the squishy middle" of the debate. Rather than rehashing old arguments in which both sides will not relent, Stewart suggested working together in areas such as education.[5]

Jon's critics argue that he tries to hide behind his role as a comedian while trying to be seen as a serious figure capable of having great discussions which can be funny and enjoyable. To the same effect, others accuse him of blurring the line between comedian and serious interviewer in a way which is difficult to take. Tucker Carlson and Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead have censured Stewart for criticizing politicians and newspeople in monologues on his show, but rarely taking the same people to task face-to-face in interviews with them. A few years ago Pop-culture and TV critic Ken Tucker wrote in New York magazine that "Jon Stewart wants to treat politics as a joke, and still teach us a civic lesson. He can't have it both ways". He added about the show - "It’s full of half-baked taped bits relying on hoodwinking-the-rubes interviews that condescend to a big chunk of the citizenry Stewart would like to mobilize as well as to entertain. As for his interviews with politicians, it’s unfortunate that Stewart overthinks his questions into circular logic: He tries so hard to be the anti-anchorman that he ends up being a disdainfully mediocre one, tossing verbal Twinkies and Ho Hos at everyone from John Kerry to Ralph Reed, ending up with sugary, jittery segments. (Oh, and y’know, Lewis Black has really never been funny a second in his life.)" . To quote another, Michael Moynihan in Reason said of Jon's intrinsic message of journalistic responsibility to the public discourse from mainstream media outlets - "As Kurtz writes in Reality Show, the comedian is obsessed with the question of why journalists couldn't find ways to report the 'truth.'" But Stewart has a lot to learn about the news if he thinks there is one "truth" to be reported. And the networks have a lot to learn if they see The Daily Show as a model."(Stewart had criticized the state of television journalism and pleaded with the show's hosts of CNN's Crossfire to "Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America," and referred to them as partisan hacks).

However, it becomes hard to take these critical contrarian views themselves too seriously in the light of audience statistics revealed in favor of what has become the bellwether of political satire of our times. Ratings show that the program generally has 1.45 to 1.6 million viewers nightly, quite a high figure for cable television. During the 2004 US presidential election, the show received more male viewers in the 18-34 year old age demographic than Nightline, Meet the Press, Hannity and Colmes and all of the evening news broadcasts. Because of this, commentators such as Howard Dean and Ted Koppel posit that Stewart serves as a real source of news for young people, regardless of his intentions. A survey, released by the Pew Research Center on April 15, 2007, indicates that regular viewers of The Daily Show tend to be more knowledgeable about news than audiences of other news sources[6]. The Daily Show's buoyant candor and refreshing ingenuousness is one reason why many people prefer to get their news fix from Stewart's show rather than conventional news outlets, making the show's onetime slogan – "The most trusted name in fake news" – more clairvoyant and ironic than Stewart probably ever intended it to be. And as far as retorting to the critics on hammering public personas goes, his chastising of Jim Cramer and his network CNBC, and accusing the famed host of Mad Money of putting entertainment above journalism has been a viral internet phenomenon. In true-blue Stewart style , for his parting line for the night before Cramer's hyped appearance on Comedy Central, Jon talked of it as "the inevitable consummation of this largely manufactured battle between a man who makes people laugh for a living and whatever people think I do.”