On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 2:50 AM, Steve Timko <[email protected]> wrote:
> Interesting recap of the attention TDS is a receiving plus a video of > Stewart's pre-show Q&A. > > http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/07/jon-stewart-white-house-wyatt-cenac-daily-show-secrets > Stewart addressed this last night (I guess I will leave it at that for now) - after responding to viewer Twitter questions in a scene in which I thought he might address the Cenac stuff, but didn't. It was in the context of a comic bit, but had his unmistakeable serious voice ("I don't know if they were secret - I mean, I'm in the visitor's log and they took pictures of the meeting" - that last is a set up for a visual joke, but I can not find the picture online yet). Politico proves yet again that it is the worst, and Vanity Fair does not do much better - continuing the breathless tone in discussing these two meetings. It is a by now unsurprising comment on the state of American journalism that two short meetings in seven years between a fake news-reader and the president are presented as part of some secret conspiracy or conflict of interest, while the regular schmoozing and back-massaging that goes on between supposedly real journalists and the high level politicians they are supposed to be covering is treated as simply the necessary grease that provides "access". In his opening segment Stewart may have gone a bit out of his way to demonstrate what is clear to anyone who has watched his show during the Obama years - he has been a fairly tough critic of this president. Last night he used what in the eyes of most people not under the influence of FN has been a wildly successful and morally courageous African trip by Obama to make a point about American arrogance (Obama telling saying that policies that discriminate against women are "stupid") leading up to the kicker - pointing out that while Obama has been willing to make a show of his courage in lecturing African countries, when he visited Saudi Arabia during his first year in office he never raised concerns about their human rights abuses (punchline "let that be a lesson to Africa - you want to fuck with people, you have to lube them up first" - over a graphic of a barrel of oil). True Stewart's recent interview with Obama was mostly a mutual congratulation society, but Stewart has been extremely tough on Obama in the past, consistently taking the view that all the "hope and change" rhetoric of his first campaign was BS, that Obama caved on health care reform (Stewart was one of those who made a fetish of the "Public Option"), and that his inability to close Gitmo, ongoing surveillance of Americans and over reliance on drone strikes makes him not substantively different that his predecessor. Jon Stewart has "covered" three US Presidents. I think most current viewers and TV and political pundits forget just how tough he was on Clinton during the last two full years of his administration - tougher than Dave or Leno (and Dave was pretty tough, I will have to leave it to others to comment on Leno). If he was tougher on Bush than Clinton (and he was) it was because he had 8 years of the latter, and, by any standard that would make even a pretense at being objective, the problems of the Bush administration were more serious than fellatio in the Oval Office. I think it would be fair to rank the presidents in order of how critical Stewart has been as Bush, Clinton, Obama, but it would be unfair to suggest either that he has not been critical of Obama (he has been, at times very harshly, and at critical points in his presidency) or that two short meetings with Obama are the reason he has been less harsh than he was on the guy who finger fucked his 19 year old intern or the guy who led the country into both the worst foreign policy and the worst financial crises in living memory while laughing his way over a devastating hurricane in the process of killing 1800 Americans. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
