Oliver, Bee, Minhaj, and Nolan
It’s been more than three years since Jon Stewart left the Daily Show and placed the hosting responsibilities in the capable hands of Trevor Noah. The show has changed from an editorializing platform that used comedy as the medium of discourse to a show that satirizes current events to create a shared social experience via the laughter of the absurdity of the situation. The main difference between Stewart’s approach to hosting and Noah’s is the fact that Noah has taken a less confrontational tone with other news outlets. Fox News is less likely to be mentioned as part of the overall content found on the Daily Show. More ludicrous situational human interest stories now replace the stories that Stewart would call bullshit. Alex Jones and Infowars are more of a target for Stephen Colbert on the Late Show than the Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
One of the common threads between Stewart’s version of the show and the current one is that Noah is developing talent. There are currently six correspondents and two contributors that Noah hired. The only contributor that Noah didn’t hire that is still on the show is Lewis Black, who has been on the show since Craig Kilborn was the host. Those who came in after Stewart left seem to borrow Noah’s stance when it comes to comedy.
Noah’s technique with regards to comedy is a reflection of his stand-up, and that technique relatively easy going when compared to Stewart more confrontational approach to the media and political environment. Noah’s roster seems to note the problems associated with a given topic softly. One could look at how both hosts have decided to cover Donald Trump. Stewart (after leaving the Daily Show) has used the Late Show as a platform to provide a rhetorical retort against Donald Trump’s “gleeful cruelty.” Noah highlights the ridiculous nature of Trump’s use of Twitter in “The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library” tour.
The post-Stewart era in late night comedy shows is defined by how those that worked at the Daily Show with Jon Stewart have used their platform to focus on political issues for both the purpose of creating comedy and shining a spotlight on those issues.
With these differences in mind, it seems necessary to examine what the alumni and “spiritual alumni” to the Daily Show with Jon Stewart have created since Jon Stewart has ended his run on the Daily Show. Specifically, it would be reasonable to discuss four such people to examine whether it is still fair to support Jon Stewart’s claim that the type of content he was producing for the Daily Show would not fit the criteria of journalistic work or rather was not “fake news” before Trump hijacked the term of art.
Defining Journalism
It is important to denote and separate journalistic work, from both satire (the old “fake news”) and propaganda (the new “fake news”). American Press Institute uses a pretty straight-forward definition for this type of work:
Journalism is the activity of gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information. It is also the product of these activities.”
American Press Institute
I tend to focus on a more narrow definition with the more ethical components of the field. The description that I more commonly use is:
Journalism is any form of content that explains a topic/issue/point of interest/event of current interest using a truthful, compelling narrative to a given audience in a manner that allows the audience to understand anything that influences that given narrative as the voice or record of the given community. It must explain why the audience should care about that topic/issue/point of interest/event. Finally, it must follow the ethos and spirit of the practice of journalism.”
“The Appalachian Discourse: A Critical Analysis of the Network Communication within the Appalachian region of the USA”
The ethos and spirit come from a composite of the various professional organizations that promote the welfare of the craft of journalism. According to the Society of Professional Journalists, Society for Collegiate Journalists, the Radio, Television, and Digital News Association, Poynter, and the Newseum, the ethics and spirit of journalism means representing reality within the context of the medium, giving a voice to the voiceless, being a fair representative of the community being covered, acting as the “fourth estate,” being the cornerstone of society, dealing with the technological concerns, and enforcing violations of the code.
It is under this construction that we can begin to discuss the impact of Stewart’s alumni to the current state of journalism. Three of the people worth studying in this article are alumni of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and one has evolved her show to fit the post-Daily Show model. Let’s start with one of Stewart’s more award-winning protégés, John Oliver.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Last Week Tonight seems to be the next logical progression to the style of the comedy show that Stewart created during his tenure at the Daily Show. Oliver removes the premise of being a fake news show or a parody newscast by focusing on one topic in great detail instead of attempting to cover multiple stories using the same level of focus for each story during the half-hour format. The first segment of the show is a recap of the week via short video packages, and Oliver provides humorous commentary regarding the stories.
The flexibility of the HBO programming aids this in-depth analysis that Oliver uses in his show. It is not unusual for the show to run over by ten minutes if his topic is particularly noteworthy, worth more extended deliberation, or involves putting dogs or wax statues in strange situations. The by-product of this focus is that it allows Oliver to discuss topics, issues, points of interests or events that other shows would not have the time, energy, or resources to cover. One example of a story that traditional would not be covered by other show was his series on televangelists.
Oliver used the structure of his show to first present a story on the nature of churches in the United States as they relate to the tax code and the legal protections they enjoy. The extension of the argument is that due to the nature of the broadness of the definition of being a church in the United States that anybody can create a church, collect donations from people, claim the tax-free revenue, and spend the money however they see fit (including jets for the pastor, vacation homes, and other gifts that support the prosperity gospel that is being preached). The story used the standard satirical approach to news that has been commonly used by Weekend Update, Daily Show, and other comedy news shows. The next step takes the story beyond the essential functions of journalism (that is, explaining the issues of the day using truthful, compelling narratives that the audience would recognize as a somewhat fair representation of the current state of affairs within a given topic, issue, point of interest, or event) and presents a more editorialized form of content that demands that the audience acts upon the knowledge gained for the presentation of the story.
Oliver created Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption as a means of not only exploring the process of creating and maintaining a church in the United States but also the limits that an organization can go to in order to push the envelope of tax laws and federal mandates. The theater of the absurd created by this stunt created more awareness to the potential fraud these churches can perform. This level of focus has not be placed on these organizations since Diane Sawyer did a feature on Robert Tilton in the 1990s. The series of sketches that Oliver did related to the Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption performed the dual role of creating humor about the situation and providing a critical and analytical lens toward how these organizations influence American culture and politics.
One other example that can show how Last Week Tonight is performing this duality of a comedy show and the aggregation of journalistic content to provide background and more details to their audience was related to investigations regarding Russia’s interference in the U.S. Presidential elections. Oliver will often refer to this topic as “Stupid Watergate” as it is “a scandal with all the potential ramifications of Watergate, but where everyone involved is stupid and bad at everything.” Oliver is often able to provide clear contextual connections between the different narrative threads of the case and turns those threads to a tapestry.
If the current state of affairs in the White House can be called “Stupid Watergate,” Last Week Tonight could be considered the “Idiotic Woodward and Bernstein.”
The next personality worth examining to look at the post-Daily Show with Jon Stewart effect on journalism is Samantha Bee.
Full Frontal with Samantha Bee
Samantha Bee is arguably one of the more divisive of the former correspondents of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The primary rationale for this statement is the rhetoric she used towards Ivanka Trump and Trump’s defense of the juvenile immigration policy of the current administration. She noted in the way that she covered the current immigration crisis that “a potty-mouthed insult would be inherently more interesting to them than juvenile immigration policy.” Bee shows her passion towards the causes she similarly champions on her show to the ways that Stewart championed causes on his show.
Full Frontal has a practical disadvantage compared to Last Week Tonight as the latter is on HBO and is presented commercial free, where Bee needs commercial breaks to paid for her show. These breaks present two challenges to Bee. First, she has nine to fifteen minutes less content than Oliver per show. Less content per week means she must depend more on the humor than the journalistic component as the show is billed as a comedy show. The second problem that Bee runs into is the fact that if the sponsors do not like her content or there are called to boycott, as what nearly happened during the Ivanka controversy, that she would lose revenue for TBS. That loss in income could result in notes from the network or her show being canceled. This issue of revenue is classic argument that journalism has struggled with for years. One could make the case that this issue was central to the movie “Network.”
Bee works with these disadvantages by not spending the entire show on one topic. Full Frontal borrows essentially the format of the first half of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart by creating mini-vignettes throughout the show as a means of tying together a central theme or creating a broader awareness for a topic, issue, point of interest, or event. One of the best examples of how Bee weaves together those vignettes into one coherent construction would be the show’s “Not the White House Correspondents Dinner.”
Bee used the decision of the President not attending the White House Correspondents Dinner to create both a show that explain the threats to the function of journalism under the current administration via their rhetoric, actions, and allowances of acts by other nations and uses the event to raise money and support for the Committee to Protect Journalists. Her show finds the humor in the seriousness of this time and performs a critical analysis of the relationship between the current administration and the press in front of the press themselves. This seriousness points to one of the ways that Full Frontal functions as a journalistic entity; they are acting as a guardian of the “fourth estate” through a bitter satire of the current political state of affairs.
The significant advantage between Bee and the rest of the people being covered in the article is that Bee has access to a traditional audience. Oliver work is mostly on HBO, a pay cable channel (though a person can watch most of the segments of Last Week Tonight on YouTube). The next two figures are primarily available via pay streaming services: Hasan Minhaj and Katie Nolan.
Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj
The last of the Jon Stewart alumni that should be examined in this article would be Hasan Minhaj. Patriot Act is a Netflix show that is a fast-paced, hyper-visual, and culturally-grounded look at the topics of the day that takes the advances in the format that Samantha Bee uses in Full Frontal (standing up as opposed to behind a desk, full video wall with graphics as opposed to graphic in the corner of the screen, and deconstructing an argument point-by-point as opposed to just presenting a story within the context of the broader cultural and social issues) and modify those techniques for the Netflix audience. Minhaj himself noted this modification of the format by calling his show:
Think of a funny investigative report meets comedy show meets political satire meets Malcolm Gladwell — but funny — and it’s on a bunch of screens like a Drake concert.”
Watch Queer Eye‘s Tan France make over Hasan Minhaj for Patriot Act
One part of the formula in particular that Patriot Act uses effectively to examine the merit of a given claim within a story is the use of infographics. The video walls behind Minhaj transition between the images of the individuals within the story and the information those individuals are using. One example that shows how effective this use of graphics comes from the episode that he did on “Affirmative Action.” Minhaj moved quickly between a series of quick-fire jokes, video cut-ins of soundbytes and news stories, and a critical analysis of the claims being made in the video segments. These switches that Minhaj does on the fly represents establishing and representing the reality within the context of the medium. He can present a rhetorical position that is supported with citations and historical artifacts.
There a reason that he wanted “really large iPads” as part of his show and this was it.
One other important note regarding Minhaj is the interactions that occur within the show. The nature of his show is more conversational than the previous two examples. Examining both Last Week Tonight and Full Frontal will show that the hosts are addressing the camera more often than they are addressing the live studio audience. Minhaj seems to be at home more with the studio audience. He often calls his audience “my people” and “our own community.” This particular use of language that Minhaj incorporates into his show builds a sense of credibility that he understands the issues that face a given community and can speak with an ethos that few journalists and fewer comedians can deliver. It is this ethos that fulfills another role of journalism, that is being a fair representation of the community being covered via the media.
These previous examples have two common themes. First, they directly worked with Stewart before his retirement. Second, their shows tend to focus on political or political-tangent subjects. The last person that I want to focus on doesn’t fit these themes. However, I believe she has modeled her show on the post-Stewart template. The final person worth examining in this analysis is Katie Nolan.
Always Late with Katie Nolan
Katie Nolan is not a political comedian for the most part. With that being said, it is essential to see how her show has evolved in the past few months to become a topical show about sports that uses comedy to speak to central truths within society. It seems she is channeling the giving a voice to the voiceless ethos of journalism. The rationale for this argument is the episode that dealt with Kareem Hunt, Reuben Foster, and the issues with domestic abuse in professional sports.
The nature of ESPN could force the talent on the network to be public relations for all of sports. ESPN Plus however allows for more flexibility in the messaging and content delivery by their talent. She used her platform and presented a pathos argument about the need to do more to deal with the issues surrounding domestic abuse in professional sports. The story used proper news gathering techniques to frame the argument that the NFL could do more and that the Chicago Cubs was at least attempting to address the issue rationally.
It is also fair to discuss how her monologues have evolved to address the woes that face sports. She has used humor and biting wits to focus on the issues surrounding college football coaches, sneaker culture, and the pay issues in the WNBA. Sports journalism is cited as losing its journalistic focus and credibility as athletes with limited journalism education are replacing reporters with experience. This act of replacing talented reporters means that networks can paint sports as a carefree and light activity. Nolan’s work is vital as it shows the reality of sports culture and uses humor to cut the depressing seriousness of the issues that face most sports league and still be entertaining to her audience.
So What?
John Oliver noted the need for local journalists to cover the important stories of the day. Last Week Tonight merely acts as a point of aggregation of this important work. The show can not exist with the work of newspapers, radio stations, and local television news teams. The first argument is that long-form comedians can fulfill some of the functions of journalism in society if it works in concert with local journalists covering important issues.
The second and last argument that should be made is one that Stewart has made about comedy and comedians in 2010.
a comedian who, with political and social concepts, criticizes them from a haughty yet ultimately feckless perch,”
MSNBC Rachel Maddow Transcript
The power to act and make changes is in the hands of the populace. Long-form comedy, like journalism, tries to focus the attention on the concerns of the day.