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Is Jon Stewart's Return Too Little Too Late?

Photo credit: Getty
Photo credit: Getty

From Esquire

In August of last year, Jon Stewart sat behind his Daily Show desk for the final time. His retirement from The Daily Show had been many months in the works. No one could have known that the following year would see the rise of Donald Trump and the devolution of American progressivism.

Besides a handful of brief appearances, Stewart's voice was largely absent from late night comedy and political commentary. True, he had no show, but anyone who is connected to the Internet has a platform, especially a wildly popular comedian, host, and satirist. Yet Stewart's comments on the election were few and far between this year leading up to the election night that changed America.

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Since then, he's spilled more quotes in the last month than in the previous 12 combined. Stewart is promoting the new book, The Daily Show: An Oral History, and has provided lengthy interviews to CBS and other major news outlets, including a talk with The New York Times this week.

There, he leveraged a critique of the media that could only come from an outsider. Talking about the prevalence of fake news sites packaging propaganda as journalism, he put pressure on news organizations for their weak treatment of facts in what has become "an information-laundering system."

Stewart described the "information laundering" as the progressive surfacing of news-fake, or otherwise-from unverified sources into the mainstream. Because second-hand reporting is so common, he said, and is often done without serious vetting of sources, even relatively reputable news organizations will report on something that a blog or platform of unknown credibility has written. While these sites may provide attribution originally, another publication may omit the original source of the news in their reporting of the report. "That piece of information [on where the news came from] has now been laundered," Stewart explained-and the original news, whether or not its source was credible, has now gained more credibility, especially if it was picked up by outlets known for their high standards.

He also doubled down on some of his comments he made on CBS This Morning.

"Not everybody that voted for Trump is a racist," he said. "I don't give a fuck what any of you say to me. You can yell it at me, you can tweet it at me. They're not all racists. Or they're not giving tacit support to a racist system ... We all give tacit support to exploitative systems as long as they don't affect us that badly."

Speaking on Trump's emerging Administration of Doom, Stewart pointed out that, during the campaign, Trump said Hillary Clinton "was an unqualified Secretary of State because the way she handled classified material." He added: "His selection for Secretary of State will be David Petraeus, who pled guilty to mishandling classified material. He said she was unqualified because she gave a speech to Goldman Sachs. His Secretary of the Treasury is somebody from Goldman Sachs. We're in post-accountability."

So how do we get through the next four years? Stewart is optimistic.

"Obama didn't change and fix everything and Trump can't ruin everything. If we're that vulnerable to one guy, that guy-that's how we're going out?" he said. "This incredible experiment in liberty and democracy that we fought and died for is going to go out―with that guy. That can't be how this story ends... Fucking buckle your seat belt and get ready."

There's not much Stewart's analysis can change in hindsight, just as his singular voice wouldn't have reversed the course of the election. Perhaps his absence these long 18 months was to give space to John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah, and Stephen Colbert-all of whom were covering the election extensively on new platforms. But his outlook of the future is important. We shouldn't give up, we shouldn't consider this the end of the world, and we should find common ground between the left and the right. It's not ideal timing, but Stewart is back now, and anyone who is listening should take note.

[h/t: Quartz, Huffington Post]

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