Liberals are doubling down on ‘comedy news’There’s been a lot of discussion in the media whether the president-elect of the United States should be “normalized.” I’d say that point became moot when Donald Trump reached 270 electoral votes around 2 a.m. on Nov. 9.
Here’s a more relevant question: When will the media stop normalizing the political musings of Jon Stewart, Larry Wilmore, Trevor Noah and all the other late-night comics?
When will the leading news organizations stop mistaking court jesters for seasoned experts? Implicitly, the members of this crew boast of their lack of interest in understanding political issues every time they try to deflect criticism of their political humor by protesting, “I’m just a comedian.” Why not take them at their word?
Yet here they are, being treated as sober observers of the American scene. Stewart, on “CBS This Morning,” opined that Republicans have a “cynical strategy” to destroy government, then “use its lack of working” as evidence that it doesn’t work. Sure, Jon. Remind me — which party has controlled those notoriously super-functional governments in Baltimore, Chicago and Detroit for the last 50 years or more?
Stewart got no rebuttal for this absurd claim, because Stewart never does. The media give him the same hushed, respectful treatment they once gave church leaders, which is fitting enough in a way, since what Stewart delivers is Church of Liberalism dogma, not informed analysis.
Wilmore, who unlike Stewart doesn’t even have much of a fan base (his Comedy Central program, “The Nightly Show,” was canned after just 18 months because it was drawing only 150,000 viewers in the 18-34 demographic, a bit more than half of what Trevor Noah’s “The Daily Show” drew during that time), was welcomed this week to the pages of The New Yorker, which published his views on the election alongside those of eminent novelists Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison and Junot Diaz.
Such is Wilmore’s stature at The New Yorker that the magazine’s legendary fact-checking department took the day off and allowed him (in arguing absurdly that Trump channeled the spirit of the Ku Klux Klan) falsely to attribute to Woodrow Wilson the statement that the film “The Birth of a Nation” was “like writing history with lightning.” (The New Yorker ran the quotation using the weasel word “reportedly” — shades of Trump’s “many people are saying.”)
Wilmore also was invited last week to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he gave the Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics. Said Wilmore, “I do find it ironic that we elect a reality-show star as president, and you invite a fake journalist to give the Theodore H. White lecture on it,” Wilmore told the audience. Ha, ha. Here’s one difference between Trump and Wilmore: Trump has proven a huge success.
In his appearance on “CBS This Morning,” Stewart’s “Daily Show” successor, Trevor Noah, sputtered nonsensically, “I acknowledge a white working class that is something we can talk about, but we cannot deny that many of Donald Trump’s supporters were earning large amounts of money and doing great for themselves, but there are people who put two things above everything else — and that is whiteness and that is also sex and misogyny.”
So the majority of white women who voted for Trump did so because they hate women. Sure.
Political comics argue they don’t have to be fair to both sides, and they’re right. They’re not intellectually equipped to consider both sides of any issue. So let’s not ask them for their ideas on politics. How Stewart et al. get laughs is by dealing in hyperbole, selective quotation, special pleading, question-begging and (when all else fails) dismissing an idea’s proponents as hypocrites: in other words, cheap shots.
When you offer insights like, “It’s pretty clear who ruined America: white people” (Samantha Bee) or call the mass murders of French citizens by radical Muslims a “pastry fight” (John Oliver), you’ve forfeited any right to be taken seriously.
The smartest move Stewart ever made was turning down NBC’s pleas that he take over hosting duties on “Meet the Press” in 2014: He knew he’d be an embarrassment to himself and to NBC.
“News and entertainment have melded in a way,” Stewart told Rolling Stone. “But they would be overcompensating on the entertainment side.”
No kidding.
http://nypost.com/2016/11/21/liberals-are-doubling-down-on-comedy-news/
