Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are two super sly newscasters. They know exactly how the American people feel and what they want, they can play to just about any group or audience while basing statements exclusively off the facts (for the most part), and they’re just all-around funny guys. Who better to represent our country that these guys?
In an interview with Jim Cramer, the official commentator of Mad Money, a show about making easy money quickly, Stewart brings up key arguments against Cramer’s work and what he says his purpose is. Cramer says that he tries his best to expose and call out the people in high places (mainly, financial industry leaders and mavens) in order to get them noticed and held responsible for any illegal or distrustful actions. Stewart argues that while Cramer says this is what he’s doing, there is a serious second agenda that he and his show have (as well as the financial network that airs the show), which revolves around creating an entertainment show that tells some of the facts and acts like they care about the state of the economy and serious monetary decisions when they really don’t.
Stewart told Cramer that the money and finances that he’s always talking about are very serious parts of our nation–”they’re not a f***ing game.” (Jon Stewart Interview)
Stewart uses clips from another interview with Cramer where he’s caught discussing financial decisions and practices that he seems to be against on his own show as an incentive to try and get him to speak freely. As Stewart attacked Cramer and the people he represented, I realized that he’s a heck of a lot like Will McAvoy from The Newsroom, a show which our Mass Media class is watching this semester. Like McAvoy, Stewart gets straight to the point and interrupts the interviewee every single time s/he goes off topic. It’s a form of questioning and investigative journalism that is almost completely unseen on regular news channels. On Fifth Estate shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, this kind of questioning is not only possible, it’s heavily desired.
This two-part interview with Jim Cramer can be viewed here.
As for Stephen Colbert, he interviewed Julian Assange, creator of WikiLeaks, a site devoted to releasing corporate and government secret documents and media to the United States public. Assange believes that what he’s doing is something that is and always has been a part of the flow of information to the people. By providing them with information that would otherwise be denied from them, the people have a freedom to know who did what when.
In a very similar manner to that of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert gets straight to the point with his statements and questions and allows no time to dance around the straight, hard answer, whatever it may be.
Colbert counters what Assange believes with some humor, but true humor at that. “Governments are elected based on what the people know about the government…if we don’t know what the government’s doing, we can’t be sad about it.” It seems funny at first, but there is some truth to this statement, especially in the fact that many people have a policy of ‘ignorance is bliss.’ Assange doesn’t believe in this kind of thinking, and feels that by reveling secrets to the public, he and the site can 1) provide the source of the leak with the maximum possible political impact, and 2) provide the public with the full, uncensored source material.
In the case that Colbert brings up involving a secret video of an Apache helicopter attack on innocent people in Baghdad, Assange makes it clear that he titled the video “Collateral Murder” to achieve maximum political effect for the source. ”That’s not leaking. That’s a pure editorial,” Colbert responded.
The extended interview with Julian Assange can be viewed here.
These two video interviews lead to very serious questions about who has the right to edit what the public sees. Even though both appear to have only the best intentions for the American people, there are clear underlying motives to persuade and influence decision-making processes and opinions. As Dr. Alan Grant said in Jurassic Park III, “some of the worst things imaginable have been done with the best intentions.”