@dkmich

Coordination by the media could not have been more obvious.

Stewart did a two-part interview of Bernie in 2011 that was favorable, but did not interview Bernie at all in 2015-16, while Sanders was running. Odd, right?

This is the favorable segment my essay mentioned. Before that, Stewart mocked Sanders as much as anyone else did. http://www.cc.com/video-clips/l7uzqg/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-dem... Even this "remedial" segment, Jon gets in a few digs on Bernie, though he gets in a few on Hillary, too.

Note Bernie's shorter hair is shown in this clip, so Jon knew he had no reason to take a crass parting shot at Bernie's hair during his last week as Daily Show host. Again, I am a huge fan of Stewart, but, politically, he is not what many think he is.

I think it was coordinated. Jimmy Dore had a show on this. I looked but can't find it. His point was that all the "lefty" blogs, comedians, etc. all fell into line attacking Bernie and supporting Hillary around the same time. I wonder if it was March 15? That isn't a coincidence.

@Alligator Ed

one news person and politician after another speaking the identical words, to show, without having to say it, how much establishment talking heads, from Fox to MSNBC and everything in between, coordinated with establishment politicians.

Ironic that, as it turns out, Stewart and his protégé , John Oliver, were among them. It's like Al Capone pointing out corruption in Chicago in 1930--only, to my knowledge, Capone was never that hypocritical. Murderous, yes; hypocritical, no.

I'm still a fan of the humor of Stewart and Oliver. I just wish they'd use their powers for good, rather than for neoliberals. Jon did stand firm on charter schools, but that was because of his mom. And he did prove Goolsbee was lying about cuts to fuel subsidies for the poor. I guess, when it comes to elections, though, he's in the camp of "Liberals don't win elections, so make sure the neoliberal wins the primary."

Absolutely right, Henry. Wish I could find the URL for those cynical videos which show the newsbots on dozens of channels repeating exactly the same words on a particular news item on the same day. Parrot city--unfortunately Polly gets ear plugs when anything good about Bernie is said.

@Mark from Queens

Thank you.

Just to let you know, I tried a couple of times clicking on "here" in this line from your post:" But as I was just saying here, there is a whole big roster of Neoliberal phonies who love to grandstand on social issues

and, each time, I got

Page not found
The requested page "/comment/%3Ca%20href=%22http://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-jokes-on-you%22%3E%3C/a%3E" could not be found.

If I may, I'll reprise my long comment on this from Sept.

A few years ago an excellent writer for the Baffler sussed out this whole Neoliberal comic news explosion for what it was and still is. It's a must-read called, "The Joke's On You." Since then some truly progressive liberal (and somewhat radical) comics have risen, and I hope they challenge their dominance by really speaking truth to power. Of course I'm speaking of Lee Camp and Jimmy Dore, who in a recent interview at the Truthdig offices accurately told them, "all tv comedians are corporatists."

But as I was just saying here, there is a whole big roster of Neoliberal phonies who love to grandstand on social issues, but when it comes to challenging the system of capitalism which inherently drives crushing economic inequality that is utterly destroying the fabric of society around the world, well, they've got thick stock portfolios, real estate investments to protect and CEO's to answer to, and are nowhere to be found. First and foremost the comics will self-edit in their brains, which means distracting from that conversation while they get cheap laughs shooting conservative buffoonery and malice in a barrel, which allows their Neoliberal viewers to feel a false sense moral superiority within the duopoly charade, which essentially lays the strict confines for their jobs.

Really, the Baffler piece is too good not to excerpt liberally from (forgive the pun). Folks should really read the whole thing. Here's some of the choice passages that explain how the cultural phenomenon of Stewart and Colbert (who I still think deserves enormous credit for his stunning broadside of Bush to his face at the White House Correspondents Dinner) succeed in keeping us well fed with contrived moral superiority that safely avoids the fundamental questions other great comics like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bill Hicks and Mark Twain understood.

Thanks for calling attention to this HW. Again, I think this piece and these selected passages bolster what you're putting down and hope you don't mind:

What Stewart and Colbert do most nights is convert civic villainy into disposable laughs. They prefer Horatian satire to Juvenalian, and thus treat the ills of modern media and politics as matters of folly, not concerted evil. Rather than targeting the obscene cruelties borne of greed and fostered by apathy, they harp on a rogues’ gallery of hypocrites familiar to anyone with a TiVo or a functioning memory. Wit, exaggeration, and gentle mockery trump ridicule and invective. The goal is to mollify people, not incite them.

(Stewart's) not just some poor schnook who works the assembly line at a factory then goes home to mow his lawn. He’s a media celebrity who works for Viacom, one of the largest entertainment corporations in the world. Stewart can score easy points by playing the humble populist. But he’s as comfortable on the corporate plantation as any of the buffoons he delights in humiliating.

The queasy irony here is that Stewart and Colbert are parasites of the dysfunction they mock. Without blowhards such as Carlson and shameless politicians, Stewart would be out of a job that pays him a reported $14 million per annum. Without the bigoted bluster of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, The Colbert Report would not exist. They aren’t just invested in the status quo, but dependent on it.

Consider, in this context, Stewart’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement. His initial segment highlighted the hypocrisy of those who portrayed the protestors in Zuccotti Park as lawless and menacing while praising Tea Party rallies as quintessentially patriotic. But Stewart was careful to include a caveat: “I mean, look, if this thing turns into throwing trash cans into Starbucks windows, nobody’s gonna be down with that,” he said, alluding to vandalism by activists during a 1999 World Trade Organization summit. Stewart then leaned toward the camera and said, in his best guilty-liberal stage whisper, “We all love Starbucks.” The audience laughed approvingly. Protests for economic justice are worthy of our praise, just so long as they don’t take aim at our luxuries. The show later sent two correspondents down to Zuccotti Park. One highlighted the various “weirdos” on display. The other played up the alleged class divisions within those occupying the park. Both segments trivialized the movement by playing to right-wing stereotypes of protestors as self-indulgent neo-hippies.

Stewart sees himself as a common-sense critic, above the vulgar fray of partisan politics. But in unguarded moments—comparing Steve Jobs to Thomas Edison, say, or crowing over the assassination of Osama bin Laden—he betrays an allegiance to good old American militarism and the free market. In his first show after the attacks of September 11, he delivered a soliloquy that channeled the histrionic patriotism of the moment. “The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center,” he said shakily, “and now it’s gone, and they attacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity, and strength, and labor, and imagination, and commerce, and it is gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the South of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can’t beat that.”

It does not take a particularly supple intellect to discern the subtext here. The twin towers may have symbolized “ingenuity” and “imagination” to Americans such as Stewart and his brother, Larry, the chief operating officer of the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company. But to most people in the world, the WTC embodied the global reach of U.S.-backed corporate cartels. It’s not the sort of monument that would showcase a pledge to shelter the world’s “huddled masses.” In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite of that. To imply a kinship between the towers and the Statue of Liberty—our nation’s most potent symbol of immigrant striving—is to promote a reality crafted by Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. Stewart added this disclaimer: “Tonight’s show is not obviously a regular show. We looked through the vault and we found some clips that we thought might make you smile, which is really what’s necessary, I think, uh, right about now.”

You got that? In times of national crisis, the proper role of the comedian is not to challenge the prevailing jingoistic hysteria, but to induce smiles.

By contrast, consider the late Bill Hicks, a stand-up comedian of the same approximate vintage as Stewart and Colbert...Fellow comics considered Hicks a genius, and he did well in clubs. But he never broke into national television, because he violated the cardinal rule of televised comedy—one passed down from Johnny Carson through the ages—which is to flatter and reassure the viewer. David Letterman invited Hicks to perform on his show but cut his routine just before the broadcast. Several years after Hick’s death, an apologetic Letterman ran a clip of the spot Hicks had recorded. It was obvious why Letterman—or the network higher-ups—had axed it. The routine openly mocked everyone from pro-lifers to homosexuals.

To hear Hicks rant about the evils of late-model capitalism (“By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself”), or militant Christians, or consumerism, is to encounter the wonder of a voice free of what Marshall McLuhan called the “corporate mask.” Hicks understood that comedy’s highest calling is to confront the moral complacency of your audience—and the sponsors. This willingness to traffic in radical ideas is what makes comic work endure, from Aristophanes’s indictments of Athenian war profiteers to Jonathan Swift’s “modest proposal” that Irish parents sell their children as food to rich gourmands, from Lenny Bruce’s anguished, anarchic riffs to George Carlin’s rants. “There’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever, be fixed,” Carlin once said, though not on The Daily Show. “The owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t.”

In a 1906 address at Carnegie Hall entitled “Taxes and Morals,” Mark Twain lambasted plutocrats who advertised their piety while lying about their incomes. “I know all those people,” Twain noted. “I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.” He said that word—criminal—knowing that many of these folks were seated in the gallery before him. Twain had this to say about the patriotism of his day: “The Patriot did not know just how or when or where he got his opinions, neither did he care, so long as he was with what seemed the majority—which was the main thing, the safe thing, the comfortable thing.” It’s this quality of avoiding danger, of seeking the safety of consensus, that characterizes the aesthetic of Stewart and Colbert. They’re adept at savaging the safe targets—vacuous talking heads and craven senators. But you will never hear them referring to our soldiers as “uniformed assassins,” as Twain did in describing an American attack on a tribal group in the Philippines...

Apart from bleeped out profanity, there appears to be no censorship, ideological or otherwise, enforced by the suits at Viacom. So long as Stewart and Colbert keep earning ratings (and ad dollars), they can do what they like. This is how the modern comedy plantation functions. It’s essentially self-policing. You find yourself out of a job only when your candor costs the bean counters more than it makes them.

Bill Maher learned this in 2001, when, as the host of ABC’s Politically Incorrect, he offered a rebuttal to President Bush’s assertion that the 9/11 hijackers were cowards. “We have been the cowards,” Maher observed. “Lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly.”

What followed was a textbook case of economic censorship. The right-wing media launched into the expected paroxysms, and the mainstream media fanned the fury. Maher insisted he was making a linguistic argument, not endorsing the terrorists. But it was too late. FedEx and Sears Roebuck pulled their ads, and ABC cancelled Politically Incorrect in early 2002. Soon after, the Los Angeles Press Club awarded Maher an award for “championing free speech,” and he took his act to HBO, where he didn’t have to worry about offending sponsors.

In the corporate mindset, the specifics of “content” are irrelevant. Either you generate the necessary margin, or you cease to exist. “Content is king,” as Redstone is famously fond of pointing out. And profit is God.

So long as Stewart and Colbert keep earning ratings (and ad dollars), they can do what they like. This is how the modern comedy plantation functions...

Surveying the defects of American governance more than eight decades ago, H. L. Mencken issued the following decree: “The only way that democracy can be made bearable is by developing and cherishing a class of men sufficiently honest and disinterested to challenge the prevailing quacks. No such class has ever appeared in strength in the United States. Thus the business of harassing the quacks devolves upon the newspapers. When they fail in their duty, which is usually, we are at the quacks’ mercy.”

...In a sense, these quacks have no more reliable allies than Stewart and Colbert. For the ultimate ethos of their television programs is this: the customer is always right. We need not give in to sorrow, or feel disgust, or take action, because our brave clown princes have the tonic for what ails the national spirit. Their clever brand of pseudo-subversion guarantees a jolt of righteous mirth to the viewer, a feeling that evaporates the moment their shows end. At which point we return to our given role as citizens: consuming whatever the quacks serve up next.