"And Now Your Moment of Zen": The Cultural Significance of 'The Daily Show'

The tiff began back in mid-March...

The tiff began back in mid-March when CNBC’s Rick Santelli backed out of a scheduled Daily Show appearance. The show responded by running a series of clips from several CNBC programs featuring financial experts, including Cramer, offering stock predictions that would ultimately turn out to be dreadfully wrong. In the Mad Money clip, Cramer touted the merits of investment bank and brokerage firm Bear Stearns, Inc., proclaiming that it was “fine” and that investors should hold onto their stocks. A moment later, a message appeared on the screen stating that the company had gone under within six days of this proclamation.

There followed a series of soft media jabs between the two men. Cramer laughed off the notion of being criticized by a comedian, claiming that The Daily Show had taken his comments out of context, to which Stewart responded with another set of clips from several weeks earlier in which Cramer openly called on viewers to buy Bear Stearns’ stock. Stewart’s open challenge to CNBC to send one of their financial experts to The Daily Show finally led to Jim Cramer’s now infamous March 12 appearance on the program.

While the interview, which lasted most of the program, began innocently enough—with Stewart greeting Cramer with a reassuring handshake and laughingly asking, “How did we end up here?”—it quickly descended into what New York Times writer Alessandra Stanley described as “a cathartic ritual of castigation,” uncomfortably similar to the kind of one-sided bickering for which Stewart criticized Carlson and Bagela in his 2004 Crossfire appearance. But what made the interview particularly hard to watch was Cramer’s refusal—or inability—to defend himself. He came across as frightened, nervous, and fatally unprepared, particularly when Stewart played a series of clips from a 2006 video from Thestreet.com in which Cramer himself described the intricacies of hedge fund market manipulation. “I literally cannot tell you how angry that makes me,” Stewart said in reference to the clips, abandoning his customary goofball façade. “I know you want to make finance entertaining, but this isn’t a fucking game.”

Most of the major news networks proclaimed Stewart the “winner” of the debate, though it was a hollow victory: Cramer’s reluctance to put up a fight spoke either to his recognition of his complicity in the financial crisis, as Stewart claimed (to his credit, Cramer did apologize to his viewers for offering bad information), or to his network’s refusal to be drawn into a rhetorical battle that it did not consider to be worth the effort (Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC, called the interview “unfair,” and accused Stewart of scapegoating). Either way, the interview successfully articulated Americans’ growing outrage over the economic crisis, and while even Stewart conceded how unfortunate it was that Cramer had become the face of this problem, it was at least gratifying to know that the problem did finally have a face, even if it was the wrong one.

However, it’s hard not to watch the interview and wonder if The Daily Show isn’t overstepping its own self-imposed boundaries. Is it naïve to think that Jon Stewart is above such skirmishes? Arguably, most people are largely drawn to The Daily Show because they feel alienated by the networks that the program satirizes. It is an intellectual respite from the self-aggrandizing sensationalism of traditional news sources, and as such, one can’t help but cringe a little at the idea that it, too, may have begun to take itself a bit too seriously.

The fact that the general reaction to the interview was largely split along party lines—with those on the Left praising Stewart as a champion for journalistic integrity, and those on the Right labeling him a bully—should come as no surprise, given the political makeup of the show’s audience. But it does take some of the potency out of the show’s repeated criticisms of other news organizations for their polarizing tactics.

Of course, one of The Daily Show’s main selling points is its eagerness to make jokes at its own expense, and since Cramer’s appearance, the show has made several self-deprecating references to the interview, presumably in an effort to minimize any concerns that it’s become a partisan soapbox like the news it criticizes.  A May 20th sketch featured faux-commentator John Oliver shouting at Stewart that he would not be “Cramered.” And it does seem that Stewart has retracted his claws for the time being, as evidenced by an interview with Newt Gingrich, who, when asked about the current controversy surrounding Speaker of the House Nanci Pelosi, calmly and casually dismantled Stewart’s own argument with an effortlessness that even a diehard liberal had to admire. Why else would Stewart go after Cramer with such vigor, but then so willingly let someone like Gingrich off the hook?

Still, if Stewart et al hoped to “solve” anything with the interview, which turned out to be the second most watched episode of the year and one of the top ten in the show’s history, it still isn’t clear what that may be. The content of the program certainly has not changed, nor have the attitudes of its fans and critics. In fact, in many ways, incidents like these raise more questions than they answer: How does The Daily Show perceive itself and its role in the cultural sphere? How accountable is it in terms of fairness? What distinguishes it from the puffed-up news outlets that it spoofs? Perhaps most importantly, what is the show’s overall mission, and how well did the interview help to achieve it?

It’s not that the show’s criticisms of men like Cramer are unwarranted or inaccurate. Truth is, the interview was something that Americans needed to see, if only to reassure themselves that someone in the media had not forgotten about them entirely. It’s just that, given the breadth of the show’s influence, it would be nice to believe that The Daily Show does have some sense of responsibility to its audience not to tangle itself in media squabbles.

It’s worth pointing out that the show’s viewers are already statistically less inclined to vote than viewers of other news programs. For a nation of viewers already jaded by the childish sensationalism of a self-serving media culture, the stakes are surprisingly high for The Daily Show not to let its ego run amok. And with that in mind, it’s troubling to wonder what might happen if the show were to devolve into another political forum where well-coifed pundits hurl petty invectives at one another. Stewart does such a wonderful job of poking fun at the Bill O’Reillys and the Keith Olbermans and the Sean Hannitys of the world, I’d hate to see him become one.