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A funny thing happened--actually it was unusual rather than amusing--during the course of the Maddow-Stewart encounter: it changed from an interview into a discussion. Maddow surrendered the initiative; Stewart started asking his host questions. It makes for a fascinating video. Can you imagine Larry King or Charlie Rose or Ted Koppel agreeing to relinquish control on his own show?
What the pair was trying to work out was the precise distinction between their roles in the public square. Both document what goes on in the political world and both offer commentary. Stewart, Maddow pointed out, has a rigorous staff of fact checkers, just as a journalistic organization does. She herself has tried to crack jokes in her reportage: "This sucks for me," she complained, when it turned out that Stewart is funnier. In one exchange, "You are in the game," Stewart suggested to Maddow, referring to the game of political activism. "You are in the game too," Maddow insisted. When Stewart demurred, demeaning the satirist as an impotent political actor, Maddow backtracked: "I am not on the field either." PressThink's Rosen, reflecting on this exchange, contradicted both of them: "Everyone is a player," was how he concluded his contribution.
Talking his book, Stewart claimed the ancient mantle of the court jester. "There has been a form of me around forever," he claimed, "a haughty but ultimately feckless perch." He explained his fact checking not as a journalistic activity but as a comedic one: things are funnier if they are true. He described his humor as following Jerry Seinfeld, an attempt to "comedically articulate an intangible." He admitted that his intervention into politics at that Rally to Restore Sanity was an aberration and asked for Maddow's indulgence. By contrast, journalism, he insisted, has a "high-mindedness," a political responsibility that the satirist avoids. "We are getting to be a bit more like you not you like us," was Maddow's reply.
If what they were talking about was the political sphere, then I believe that both the activist and the journalist and the satirist all engage in the public square. By activists, I refer not only to political organizers but to elected politicians and their partisans, to lobbyists, and to campaigners on the issues. Yet they do not occupy the same space, even an ideologically opinionated journalist is not the same as an activist; even a politically-acute satirist is not a journalist.
This is the distinction:
An activist is interested in wielding political power, crafting an agenda in order to change the relationship of the state to its citizens, and those citizens one to the other.
A political journalist has to report on the wielding of power--court reporting on who is up and who is down; but also on its wisdom, whether a given policy agenda addresses the problem it purports to solve; and also on the underlying conditions, the facts on the ground that activists are deciding, effectively or not, to address or to ignore. It was these second and third aspects that Koppel was rightly pointing to when he criticized cable news for its failure objectively to pay attention to facts.
A satirist studies political rhetoric, equidistant from both the activist and the journalist. The satirist's comedy skewers the folly of both political actors and those who report on them. The underlying, serious, work of inquiring into the wisdom of public policy and the underlying conditions that it addresses is non-comedic. That is why Stewart, Seinfeld-like, relies on the aah! of recognition when he tells us of some unarticulated thing that we knew all along. He is looking for the truth that lies in laughter not the truth that is found from facts on the ground. The Daily Show satirizes the news as much as it satirizes politics. To do so, it stands in a third place, distinct from either.
Interestingly enough, Professor Rosen offers Stewart some support in thinking that the jester has the oldest public persona of the three. In the inaugural lecture he gave to the Ecole du Journalisme at Paris' Sciences-Po this September, Rosen argued, following Jurgen Habermas, that politicians (in the form of the state) only entered into public debate in the latter half of C18th, when the King of France was forced into transparency about the condition of his Treasury in order to raise war funds by issuing bonds to the nascent capitalist class. Hitherto, the king's actions were considered to be nobody's business except his own. The earliest political journalism evolved almost immediately thereafter in order to analyze the contents of these declassified ledgers. By this timeline, King Lear's Fool pre-exists both public politician and political journalist by centuries. And, as Stewart notes, the Fool's perch was "ultimately feckless," to say the least.
This entire analysis is fascinating, but this section is my favorite bit.
I only wanted to comment here to note the serendipitous irony of the forewarned big Wikileaks document dump containing sensitive embassy cables that will expose State Department analyst findings from all over the world, apparently.
Before those documents are out, journalists do well to examine their commitment to government-in-the-sunshine principles. When it comes to state secrets, the journalistic commitment to transparency generally seems to be honored more in the breach than in the observance.
Meanwhile, the Internet's commitment to transparency and openness as a principle is unchallenged, if profoundly unsettling. Are we so used to the "white lies" of diplomacy that when confronted with the exposure of so much unvarnished truth, we worry that the entire global world order of nations could become destabilized?
Am I an alarmist for genuinely feeling such worry?
Yet as you point out above, ANY state transparency is a relatively recent invention. Could it be that Wikileaks is merely pushing the world of diplomacy out of its forked-tongue comfort zone?
Why should we have so much to fear from honesty and transparency, of revealed truths? The fact that we do says more about us and what frog-in-boiling-water state we've gotten up to than about the truths that will be revealed in and of themselves.
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