They Still Won't Get It

Politico have shown themselves the leaders of completely not getting the appeal and the reach of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. They don't set themselves up as completely indignant and dismissive like those on the Right do. However, the status quo media fail to understand The Daily Show because of all of the things that make them fail in general. The Daily Show has for at least a decade now been the best media criticism on TV. While Howard Kurtz was spitting Beltway wisdom and conservative talking points on CNN and Fox was pitting Cal Thomas against Mara Liasson, John Stewart was calling the system out at large for what it is, a product of its own solipsism and a prisoner of its love affair with itself. Politico reveals that they can't see this in any other context than Left versus Right in a battle that is waged for their own entertainment. I don't hail John Stewart as a visionary saviour. In fact I disagree with his emphasis on cordiality, as I insist that rationality is the more important priority. I think that demons should be demonized and there are times to panic. Nevertheless, the media at large can't find a way to take him seriously because he has steadily refused to play their game and worked actively to ruin it for them. What Politico, and others like them, miss is that the vast amounts of people who showed up in D.C. over the weekend are rooting for the demise of this very same media. There is no way that they could run the headline "Hundreds of Thousands Find Us Contemptible." So they talk about the political effect. The don't understand that carrying signs that are a commentary on the banalness of our mainstream political discourse is a way to upbraid them and unravel them at the same time so they treat it as light comedy. As I stated before, I don't necessarily march in lockstep with John Stewart and I think he goes a little heavy on the idea of civility, but the speech that he gave was absolutely right in illustrating everything that the kind of people at Politico get wrong everyday.