3

Outrage and Satire as Responses and Antidotes

just as the first generation of irony and outrage—the counterculture comedy on the left and the “hate clubs of the air” on the right—occurred concurrently in response to the political upheaval of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the second generation of irony and outrage have a parallel history as well. The outrage programs that rose to prominence in the 1990s (radio shows like The Rush Limbaugh Show and cable news shows like The O’Reilly Factor) came on the scene at the very same time as satire shows such as The Daily Show and Politically Incorrect on Comedy Central. Both outrage and satire were articulated as reactions to perceived problematic aspects of the political information environment. Both genres were fueled by the rising political polarization and media distrust that had exploded in the last third of the twentieth century. And both genres were made possible by new media technologies of the late 1990s. In the face of political polarization and a reduction of trust in journalism, conservative talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh and Fox News’s Roger Ailes created programming to deconstruct the ideological bias they perceived in mainstream news. Meanwhile, comedians worked to deconstruct the bias that they saw in the profit-driven news of that era; not an ideological bias but a bias in favor of strategy, spin, and partisan jargon. In response, shows like The Daily Show and Politically Incorrect offered their own “antidote” to the artificial mediated political world. Using satire, parody, and irony, they would deconstruct the “political spectacle.”¹

Response Option A: Outrage

“Outrage programming”: noun. Political commentary, typically presented on television, radio, or the internet, that is guided by the spirit of anger and indignation. In their 2014 book The Outrage Industry, Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj chronicle the growth of a new genre of political programming through the 2000s; programming that places a charismatic host at its center and employs tactics like hyperbole, sensationalism, ad hominem attack, and extreme language to “prove” that political opponents are hypocrites and like-minded viewers are morally superior.²

In their exploration of the roots of the so-called outrage industry, Berry and Sobieraj detail some of the same technological and regulatory changes I outlined in chapter 2. They write: “outrage has been propelled by a synergistic confluence of economic, technological, regulatory, and cultural changes that converged to create a media environment that proved unusually nurturing for outrage-based content.”³ In other words, outrage programming did not just appear out of nowhere in the 1990s. It was made technologically possible by cable and media fragmentation. It was made economically viable by political polarization and a drop in public faith in news. And was made permissible by regulatory changes that arose during that same era.

Chief among these regulatory changes that facilitated the rise of outrage was the repeal of the fairness doctrine in 1987. That act of deregulation removed the FCC’s requirement that broadcasters had to present multiple points of view in the presentation of issues to the public. Rush Limbaugh’s nationally syndicated radio show was (not coincidentally) launched in 1988.⁴ Having been a radio DJ and politically minded radio talk show host since the 1970s, Limbaugh was well-positioned to take advantage of the FCC’s ruling. The Rush Limbaugh Show immediately became radio’s most listened-to program. For 30 years, it has retained that spot (photo 3.1). In 2018, Limbaugh continues to attract about 14 million listeners per week.⁵ And he was doing this long before Fox News commentators expanded the outrage genre to television. Hemmer writes: “for the better part of a decade, from his national syndication in 1988 to the launch of Fox News in 1996, conservative media was Limbaugh.”⁶

Limbaugh’s show was and is an overt rejection of liberalism. The show’s audience is decidedly conservative. According to National Annenberg Election Survey data from 2004, Limbaugh’s listeners are older (53 was the mean), and overwhelmingly: male (67 percent), white (93 percent), Republican (78 percent), and conservative (85 percent).⁷ As a prime illustration of Berry and Sobieraj’s description of the outrage genre, the show places Limbaugh at the center, as the charismatic personality that drives the show’s political perspective and orientation to the world. His tone is brash and unapologetic, riddled with ridicule of the left. He strategically uses “emotionally evocative language”—graphic descriptions of key political issues (especially in the context of abortion)—designed to horrify and anger his listeners.⁸ His terminology (“class envy,” “econazis,” “environmental whackos,” “femi-Nazis,” “reporterettes and info-babes”) is deliberately designed to discredit liberals and journalists (especially female journalists). And research has shown that it works. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella document several outcomes of a person’s exposure to the Limbaugh “echo chamber,” including increased “moral outrage” aimed at the behavior of Democrats, increased distrust of mainstream news outlets, significant distortion of one’s understanding of politicians’ issue positions, and more extreme conservative issue positions.⁹

The success of Limbaugh’s show served as “proof of concept” for 54-year-old Roger Ailes. Ailes had started his career in the entertainment business, as executive producer of the popular (and Emmy-winning) variety show The Mike Douglas show in the 1960s. By the late 1960s, Ailes had shifted his attention to politics, serving as media consultant to Republican presidents Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. But in 1993, Ailes returned to television.¹⁰ As Gabriel Sherman writes, in the wake of Clinton’s 1992 victory, “Ailes came around to the breakthrough insight: the media industry was a much more powerful platform to spread a political message. … [He] discovered he could achieve his political goals by changing roles. Instead of being at the mercy of the networks that controlled the airtime, he could control the message by joining the media.”¹¹

Ailes’s first—quite logical—move was to serve as an executive producer on Limbaugh’s radio show. Soon after, in an effort to bring the success of talk radio to television, NBC brought Ailes on board as president of a new business and talk news cable network, CNBC. Part of Ailes’s charge at NBC was the development of a new 24-hour television channel dedicated to opinion talk. For Ailes, a populist who had always had a disdain for elites, an all-talk political channel seemed a natural fit.¹² At the new network, called America’s Talking, Ailes created programming that tackled political issues according to the language and sensibility of regular people, and he used technology to invite those regular people to become a part of the show. The formula had worked for Limbaugh, and now Ailes sought to bring the same guiding philosophy to cable.¹³ In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Ailes described the spirit of America’s Talking: “Our society has speeded up, but the government has slowed down and our institutions are not dealing with the nation’s problems. I’d like for our business shows to give viewers what I call ‘takeaways,’ additional information that helps them live successful lives. Talk shows are personality-driven, but I’d like to find more ways to deal with the issues that are driving people crazy.”¹⁴ Ailes’s experiment was widely panned as a failure—even before it officially launched in 1994. “Many felt that the network had a down-market, public access feel,” Sherman writes. One of the junior producers described the show as “very Wayne’s World–ish.”¹⁵ And by 1996, America’s Talking was gone. It had been transformed into MSNBC.

I should note here that while the MSNBC of 2019 is a left-leaning cable news outlet that features liberal outrage programming, that iteration of the network is quite new. When it replaced Ailes’s failed America’s Talking experiment in 1996, MSNBC began featuring talk shows and news analysis shows from across the political spectrum. In fact, several conservative outrage personalities, including Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, as well as conservative pundit Ann Coulter, started their cable news careers at MSNBC. After about a decade without a clear programming niche and trailing in the cable news ratings war, in the mid-2000s the network pivoted to the left and positioned itself as a liberal alternative to Fox.

Once America’s Talking was replaced by MSNBC in 1996, Ailes took his reactionary populist philosophy to yet another 24-hour news channel. In partnership with conservative global media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Ailes embarked on the creation of a conservative news network, something he had talked about for years. As Hemmer recounts, “while Murdoch saw the channel as an alternative to what he saw as biased reporting in the news, it was Ailes who brought a fierce and unrelenting partisanship to the table.”¹⁶ After an unsuccessful bid to purchase CNN from Ted Turner, Murdoch opted for the next best thing, launching a cable network competitor to erode CNN’s market dominance. Murdoch saw Fox as an opportunity to get back at Turner while simultaneously challenging the norms of contemporary television news.¹⁷ Sherman writes: “together, Murdoch and Ailes were embarking on a holy mission to lay waste to smug journalistic standards. … Murdoch [shortly after hiring Ailes] spoke of ‘a growing disconnect between television news and its audience … an increasing gap between the values of those that deliver the news and those that receive it.’”¹⁸

Ailes openly discussed his belief that liberals dominated the media. “There are 18 shows for freaks,” he told Associated Press in 1995. “If there’s one network for normal people it’ll balance out.”¹⁹ Just as the values to which Murdoch was referring were obviously conservative values, the freaks to whom Ailes was referring were obviously liberal freaks. Statements like this expressed not just political values but psychological values as well: wanting a sense of order. Wanting to feel secure and comforted. Wanting to feel like you understand the world. “Viewers don’t want to be informed; they want to feel informed,” Ailes’s longtime creative mentor Chet Collier would tell Fox producers.²⁰ This amalgam of Fox News’s ideology and aesthetic emerged in Ailes’s 2001 interview with Marshall Sella for the New York Times:

Sitting at dinner one night at Patsy’s, his favorite Italian joint in Midtown, Ailes links his channel’s claim to neutrality with his own common-man posture. “There’s a whole country that elitists will never acknowledge,” Ailes says. “What people deeply resent out there are those in the ‘blue’ states thinking they’re smarter. There’s a touch of that in our news.” Never having lost the taste for regular-guy food from his blue-collar Ohio upbringing, Ailes says he orders mac-and-cheese from the kiddie menu when staying at five-star hotels. But Patsy’s carbonara is a swell substitute, and he takes tiny bites as he talks.²¹

The emotional feel of Fox News’s programming was always at the center of its mission. Internal memos from the early days of the network detailed the ways it would be distinct from CNN. Instead of CNN’s format, which placed news at its center, Fox would be about “personality and programming, produced information, appointment TV, news plus human interaction that was both convenient and interesting … with attitude.”²² Delivering news was hardly the primary goal that Fox News was setting out to accomplish. They boasted only nine news bureaus compared to CNN’s 30, a staff of 700 compared to CNN’s 3,500, and a budget roughly one-tenth the size of CNN’s.²³

Fox News was positioned more as a referendum on the other news channels than as a news channel in itself. In an effort to tap into the populist spirit that Ailes had championed for years, the network adopted the catchphrase “We report, you decide.” It also disparaged other news networks that it characterized as spoon-feeding liberal perspectives to their audiences. In a 1996 news conference, Ailes announced the now infamous Fox News slogan: “Fair and Balanced.” Since ABC, CBS, NBC, and the elite newspapers all leaned so consistently to the left, the logic went, Fox News, by positioning itself even slightly to their right, was offering a corrective to offset that “systemic ideological bias.” Ailes said: “in most news, if you hear a conservative point of view, that’s called bias. We believe if you eliminate such a viewpoint, that’s bias. If we look conservative, it’s because the other guys are so far to the left. So if we include conservatives in our promos sometimes, well … tough luck!’”²⁴ Internal documents from the network characterized Fox’s market position thus: “By reporting stories that competitors don’t cover, Fox would become a haven for viewers looking for relief from the one-sided reporting by competition.”²⁵ But inside the network, the slogan “Fair and Balanced” was always stated with a “wink and a nod.”²⁶

Since “personality” and “attitude” (rather than newsgathering) were the priorities at Fox, the network stacked its programming with charismatic hosts from the entertainment world rather than journalists. By creating programming focused on charismatic people who shared the network’s ideological worldview, Ailes had created an entire network to explore and cultivate the genre of “outrage.” Ailes wasn’t interested in A-list hosts. Ever the populist, Ailes, as Sherman writes, “valued authenticity over talent.”²⁷ His sense was that starting the network with lesser-known talent would fuel viewer loyalty. Plus he had contempt for the coiffed, TV-head look. He believed viewers would find accessible “regular” hosts more likable and credible.²⁸

Two of the outrage landscape’s most notable exemplars, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, were created by Ailes at the birth of the Fox News Network. Before coming to Fox, O’Reilly had been a local news anchor turned entertainment television personality, cohosting the Hollywood celebrity gossip program Inside Edition through the early 1990s. At Fox’s launch in 1996, Ailes gave O’Reilly his own show, one of the network’s many “analysis” programs on which hosts shared their opinions on current events. On The O’Reilly Factor, O’Reilly would give his perspective on current events, controversies, and headlines of the day. In a segment called “Talking Points,” he railed against the “liberal media,” the notion of “white privilege,”²⁹ and “the totalitarian left on college campuses.”³⁰ He chastised progressives for removing “Christ from Christmas” and for being “pro-illegal immigration.”³¹ Until the show’s cancellation in 2017 after allegations of sexual harassment, The O’Reilly Factor was consistently one of the top-rated cable news shows. Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times write: “for a generation of conservative-leaning Fox News viewers, Mr. O’Reilly, 67, was a populist voice who railed against what they viewed as the politically correct message of a lecturing liberal media. Defiantly proclaiming his show a ‘No Spin Zone,’ he produced programming infused with patriotism and a scorn for feminists and what he called ‘the war on Christmas,’ which became one of his signature themes.”³²

Sean Hannity had garnered notoriety early in his 1980s career after being fired from his college radio station for insulting a lesbian mother on air and then adding: “anyone listening to this show that believes homosexuality is just a normal lifestyle has been brainwashed. … These disgusting people.”³³ It was the American Civil Liberties Union that fought to restore Hannity’s show to the station’s broadcasts, citing the station’s violation of Hannity’s First Amendment rights. But Hannity, instead of returning to college radio, used the scandal as a marketing opportunity for his firebrand style and was quickly picked up by a radio station in Alabama, where he built an audience and a reputation as a regular-tough-talking-guy-angry-at-liberal-fascists.³⁴ Hannity’s populist approach was especially appealing to Ailes, who invited him to join the new cable network in 1996.

While solo-hosted shows have become a mainstay of Fox News programming, until 2009 Hannity was actually featured alongside a liberal cohost. But even then, Hannity was the alpha that drove the duo’s agenda, tone, and perspective. So much so, in fact, that until the network had landed on a suitable cohost, Hannity’s program was affectionately entitled “Hannity and LTBD” (liberal to be determined).³⁵ Since 2009, however, Hannity has been a solo outrage host, and Hannity has earned top ratings across cable news for months on end. During the Trump administration, Hannity has become must-see conservative television and the source for Trump supporters’ daily dose of outrage (photo 3.2). Echoing Dan Smoot’s allegations of a Communist “invisible government” working in the federal government, Hannity rails against the so-called deep state, a secret powerful liberal cabal working to undermine the Trump administration at every turn. He has even suggested that the Clintons, Comeys, and Muellers are “obvious Deep State crime families trying to take down the president.”³⁶

In 2009, Fox brought on board a solo outrage host who would take the genre to an entirely new level. Glenn Beck, who had been a popular “shock jock” radio personality through the 1990s, had broken into television in 2006 with his program Glenn Beck on CNN. The show was an instant success and became CNN’s second most popular show, with almost 400,000 viewers at 7 p.m. and another half million at 9 p.m.³⁷ In January 2009, Beck took his conservative views to Fox. This move coincided with the swearing-in of President Barack Obama, and Beck’s show made Obama’s domestic policies—which Beck labeled “socialist,” “Marxist,” and “Maoist”—the center of its ire. “Look in your rear-view mirror,” Beck told the Los Angeles Times; “we just passed France. I think our country is on the verge of disintegration.”³⁸ Beck would use his program to expose “dirt” on various Obama administration officials, like White House science and technology policy director John Holdren, who, Beck claimed, “has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.”³⁹ Beck purported to reveal the “truth” about various Obama policies, for example his false claim that the Affordable Care Act actually provided insurance for dogs.⁴⁰

Fueled by this sort of disinformation, Beck’s show catapulted Fox’s outrage programming into a new stratosphere of outrage—one in which the truth value of the claims was a distant second consideration to their emotional provocation. Importantly, Beck’s untruths, fearmongering, and chalkboard-concocted conspiracy theories worked. Within a month of his move to Fox, he was earning 2.2 million viewers in his time slot, more than all the other cable news networks combined.⁴¹ Beck’s success served as a roadmap for online conspiracy outlets like The Gateway Pundit and Alex Jones InfoWars, whose popularity has surged thanks to political polarization and social media algorithms.

Beck left Fox in 2011, reportedly after network executives told him to “stop talking about God.”⁴² In a shocking twist, in 2016 he began a sort of apology tour. A strong opponent of President Trump, he began to acknowledge the role he himself had played in sowing seeds of Obama-hate that had contributed to Trump’s rise. The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart writes: “the same doomsday sensibility that helps [Beck] appreciate the menace posed by Trump led him to massively exaggerate the menace posed by Obama—and thus to breed the hateful paranoia on which Trump now feeds.” But, Beinart writes, “Beck says he’s sorry for all that.”⁴³

“I played a role, unfortunately,” Beck told Megyn Kelly during a 2014 interview on Fox News, “in helping tear the country apart.”⁴⁴ Hence his 2016 appearance on Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal described in the introduction.

In 2018, Fox boasts an entire lineup of similar news “analysis” (read: outrage) shows, all featuring tough-talking solo hosts who dissect the news of the day through an accessible, conservative, angry lens. On Tucker Carlson Tonight, the founder of the Daily Caller challenges liberal critiques of “toxic masculinity,”⁴⁵ declares the concept of “white privilege” to be racist,⁴⁶ and calls liberal feminists “insincere.”⁴⁷ He talks openly of the changing demographics of the United States as a trend that many Americans—rightfully, according to him—find troubling. “Though most immigrants are nice … this is more change than human beings are designed to digest,” he stated, later asking: “How would you feel if [an increase in immigrants and minorities] happened in your neighborhood?”⁴⁸ Carlson has also become more brazen in his suggestion that mainstream news outlets not only are “biased” but “are lying.” In June 2018, the Justice Department’s inspector general released a report that contradicted President Trump’s allegations of FBI malfeasance in the investigation of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. On his show, Carlson suggested that all other news outlets were misrepresenting the report’s findings, saying: “IF you’re looking to understand what’s actually happening in this country, always assume the opposite of whatever they’re telling you on the big news stations. That is certainly the case here. They are lying.”⁴⁹

On the Ingraham Angle, former Republican speechwriter and talk radio host Laura Ingraham criticizes proimmigration “amnesty fanatics,” points to “gun rights provocateurs” trying to “repeal the 2nd amendment,”⁵⁰ calls progressive efforts to take down confederate memorabilia “Talibanesque,”⁵¹ and suggests that professional athletes should stop talking about politics and social issues and instead just “shut up and dribble.”⁵² She faced advertiser boycotts after mocking 18-year-old David Hogg, Parkland School shooting survivor and gun reform activist, tweeting: “David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges to Which He Applied and Whines about It.”⁵³

By placing solo outrage hosts at the helm, Ailes had succeeded in creating a “news channel” that, consistent with its mission, eschews actual journalism in favor of “personality” and “attitude.” The programs define who holds in- and out-group status, remind the audience of salient threats (including liberals, immigrants, feminists, and gun control activists), and reaffirm a conservative worldview. The network identifies what events or subjects to cover, thereby “making news” out of otherwise banal events. The network also plays fast and loose with facts, frequently earning negative scores from fact-checking organizations. According to Politifact, for example, 61 percent of fact-checked claims at Fox News were deemed mostly false, false, or “pants on fire,” compared to only 21 percent of the fact-checked claims at CNN.⁵⁴ While the hosts maintain that they are scrutinizing current events and illuminating truths, Berry and Sobieraj contest that claim: “because of the approach used in outrage venues, the ensuing attention offers something more akin to the captivating distortions of a funhouse mirror than to the discriminating insights of a microscope.”⁵⁵

Even as outrage hosts imply that they are the truth-tellers, they simultaneously claim that they should not be held to the same standards as actual “journalists.” After all, Fox categorizes shows like these under the label “analysis programming,” which they insist is distinct from their “news programming” (a label reserved for the noneditorializing news programs like the one hosted by Shep Smith, for example). But the extent to which viewers are actually making the distinction between news and analysis on Fox (or MSNBC or CNN for that matter) is questionable. For all of Hannity’s claims that he is “not a journalist” but “a talk show host,”⁵⁶ his show certainly has all the trappings of news. Former CNN reporter Frank Sesno, the director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, has this take on the issue: networks like Fox have succeeded in blurring the lines between news and analysis to the point where this distinction is moot. According to Sesno, “one of the dangers is thinking that people know the difference between the editorial page and the front page, between a commentator or pundit commenting on something alongside a reporter who’s supposed to be providing facts. In this environment, when you have news, talking points and opinions all colliding, it can be really disorienting to the audience.”⁵⁷ New research from Pew Research Center confirms this suspicion.⁵⁸ When given five factual and five opinion statements and asked to determine which was which, “roughly a quarter [of respondents] got most or all wrong.” Most important, “Republicans and Democrats are more likely to think news statements are factual when they appeal to their side—even if they are opinions.”⁵⁹

Regardless of whether viewers can—or want to—make the distinction between news and analysis, Fox’s outrage programming is hugely successful. The network’s total revenues more than doubled over the course of the Obama presidency (fig. 3.1).⁶⁰ And there is reason to believe that this particular correlation might actually illustrate causation. As Berry and Sobieraj explain, successful outrage hosts tell stories that allow them to “position themselves or their political compatriots in the role of the hero or to taint enemies, opponents or policies they dislike as dangerous, inept, or immoral.”⁶¹ Hence, outrage is designed to be “reactive”—to respond to the events, topics, and people of the day. Naturally, the Obama presidency proved to be an exceptional foil—and fuel—for Fox’s outrage-centered business model.

Response Option B: Satire

In 1992, the fledging cable network Comedy Central sought to mix politics and humor in their playful coverage of the 1992 presidential election, dubbed “InDecision 92.” The success of their election night programming motivated them to develop a political entertainment talk show featuring then 37-year-old political comedian Bill Maher. The show, Politically Incorrect, which launched in 1993, featured a comedy monologue by Maher, followed by spirited political conversation between four B-list celebrities from the worlds of television, film, and music, alongside political personalities and journalists. The success of the politics-entertainment-comedy-talk show catapulted it from cable network Comedy Central to “network”-network ABC in 1997, where it served as a staple of late-night programming until 2002.⁶²

With the birth of The Daily Show in 1996, producers Lizz Winstead and Madeleine Smithberg set out to create a parody program that commented not just on the politics of the day but on the emerging cable news landscape that “produced” politics as entertainment. In a recollection published in The Cut, Winstead described sitting in a bar, watching Gulf War coverage on CNN: “we were all watching the Gulf War unfold and it felt like we were watching a made-for-TV show about the war. It changed my comedy—I started writing about how we are served by the media.”⁶³ Buoyed by the spirit of experimentation and the need for content that came with the new 24-hour-cable landscape, Comedy Central signed a one-year contract for Winstead and Smithberg to “do a news satire where the genre itself was a character in the show.”⁶⁴ Without a pilot and with a guaranteed year on the air to “learn, grow, and make mistakes,” the producers and writers had the freedom to explore, caricature, and comment on the tropes of cable news, hence creating a template—and foundation—on which later comedy writers, producers, and hosts could build.

Just as the development of outrage at Fox was inspired by political, technological, and regulatory changes, so was the development of satire at Comedy Central. According to Jeffrey P. Jones, as a result of these changes, “television producers recognized the weaknesses in the system and began to offer new forms of political talk programming that they believed audiences were interested in seeing. Any objections that these new forms of political talk programming would be illegitimate because of their using celebrity hosts, or allowing people who were not experts to talk, or producing an entertainment spectacle all seemed moot, because of what pundit television itself had become.”⁶⁵ Like Jones, I see these simultaneous trends in the rise of “new political television” like Politically Incorrect and The Daily Show and the personality-driven and populist ethos of early Fox News programming as inherently connected. They are both logical outgrowths of the political and media climate that emerged in the 1990s.

In his 2010 book From Cronkite to Colbert, Geoffrey Baym connects the rise of political satire to the increase in profit-seeking news that was failing in its journalistic responsibilities.⁶⁶ Baym describes Comedy Central’s satire programming of the 2000s (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report) as reactions to journalism’s abandonment of its “high-modern” investigative ideal. Baym chronicles the shift from the sober investigative journalism of the 1970s, replete with journalistic authority (think CBS’s Walter Cronkite telling Americans at the end of each broadcast “This is the way it is”), to ratings-driven postmodern journalism, big on flash and short on substance. Baym’s account focuses on how the news media of the 1990s turned away from offering news people needed in favor of news people wanted. As a consequence of the profit-seeking motives of news executives coming out of the 1990s, Baym argues, entertainment-oriented shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report actually embraced the spirit of “high-modern” journalism even more than the so-called news shows of the time that were failing in their journalistic mission. He writes: “The Daily Show holds out the hope of reinvigorating political journalism and public discourse, celebrating the quite modernist hope that we might be able to reason our way out of the predicament in which we have been mired for too long.”⁶⁷

Both Jones and Baym suggest that the political satire of the 2000s was not just emblematic of a new genre of political information but was created with the goal of challenging elite approaches to politics. Maher’s show, in particular, marked a rejection of elite political discourse in a manner similar to the populist philosophy of Fox News under Roger Ailes. Maher’s show was designed to put regular people, actors, journalists, and other celebrities in a conversation about politics using the language and framework that normal people use when thinking about their political world. (Sounds very much like Ailes, doesn’t it?) And in perhaps the oddest illustration of the parallel histories of satire and outrage, guess who served as a celebrity guest during Maher’s first taping of Politically Incorrect back in 1993?⁶⁸

Roger Ailes. Yes. That Roger Ailes.

The missions of both genres—satire and outrage—took on new meaning and intensity in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Fox’s outrage programming in the 2000s offered a consistent ideological perspective, critiquing journalism’s perceived liberal bias and offering a conservative frame around world events.⁶⁹ Meanwhile, Daily Show host Jon Stewart, who took over from the original host, Craig Kilborn, in 1999, was positioning this news parody program as a response to his perception of the failures of mainstream journalism. Along with executive producer Ben Karlin, who had served as editor of the satire newspaper the Onion, the show developed a strong political point of view. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as the United States launched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Stewart’s Daily Show offered critiques of—and a response to—the dysfunctional, symbiotic relationship between politicians and the press. The show tackled everything from the embedding of journalists with US military units in the Middle East to the failure of the White House Press Corps to adequately challenge the Bush administration on claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Like Fox News on the right, The Daily Show identified perceived failures of the press while offering its own remedy to them. Stewart explicitly identified and critiqued aspects of mainstream news that he found absurd or troublesome. The parody segments on The Daily Show often mocked the very aspects of cable and network news programming that media scholar W. Lance Bennett described as problematic: overpersonalization, dramatization, and fragmentation. In my 2008 essay “The Daily Show as New Journalism,” I argued that the show used irony and parody to criticize practices of the postmodern newsroom that were troubling journalism scholars like Bennett. One example from the 2004 election illustrates how Stewart was explicitly critical of cable news shows’ penchant for the dramatic and personalized.

In a confident and didactic tone, Stewart introduced the program’s headlines.

“So now the debates are over, both candidates have staked out their positions on domestic policy, the war on Iraq, the war on terror, and the media can finally help the American people focus in on the important issues that will help them make an informed decision on their choice for president.”

The program then cut to nine different clips from news sources ranging from NBC to FOX to CNN, including such well-known news-people as Wolf Blitzer, Katie Couric, Judy Woodruff, Bill O’Reilly, and Jack Cafferty. In each clip, the reporter referred to [Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter] Mary Cheney’s “sexuality,” her being “gay” or a “lesbian.” Taken together in rapid succession, the banality of the topic becomes clear. Mary Cheney’s sexuality is not an issue that will ‘help the American people make an informed decision on their choice for president.’” Instead it represents the dysfunctional press bias towards the personal and the dramatic.⁷⁰

In December 2003, The Daily Show deconstructed the sensationalized cable news coverage of the discovery and capture of Saddam Hussein. In the US military’s Operation Red Dawn, the ousted president of Iraq was found at the bottom of a deep underground hole in a town outside Tikrit. Stewart’s coverage of Hussein’s capture was dominated by his criticism of the way media organizations had covered the event.

The capture of Saddam Hussein was obviously a huge story. But here’s the problem from the point of view of the 24 hour cable news standpoint: it’s only one story. It happened and now it’s no longer happening. There’s still 24 hours to fill. So how are you going to do it? Well … [cut to various computer models shown on CNN and Fox] 48 hours of nonstop computer simulations that boil down the concept of “guy in hole” to something even they layman can understand. But computers are so cold, impersonal, so … accurate. [Cut back to Stewart] Is there some theatrical, cheesy, low budget, perhaps way of doing this? ah yes … MSNBC [cut to MSNBC clip of female reporter in high heels and a suit standing in and then crawling down into a plywood model of Saddam Hussein’s “spiderhole”].⁷¹

Stewart was an outspoken critic, in interviews and on the lecture circuit, of the exploitation of news programs by partisan pundits and surrogates. He saw the norm of “he said/she said” journalism as serving the interests of politicians, candidates, and parties while undermining the ability of news reporting to serve the public and democracy. In a 2004 interview with Ted Koppel on Nightline,⁷² Stewart argued that news hosts, in pitting representatives of the left and the right against each other without challenging the arguments they made, were failing to do their job: “she throws out her figures from the Heritage Foundation and she throws her figures from the Brookings Institute, and the anchor, who should be the arbiter of truth says, ‘Thank you both very much. That was really interesting.’ No it wasn’t! That was Coke and Pepsi talking about beverage truth. And that game is what has, I think, caused people to go, ‘I’m not watching this.’”⁷³ At a 2004 forum held at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, Stewart articulated what he thought journalists ought to be doing: “I think there is a responsibility within the media to help. You could create a paradigm of a media organization that is geared towards no bullshit—and do it actively—and stop pretending that we don’t know what’s going on. And stop pretending that it’s a right/left question. I don’t buy that the world is divided into bi-chromatic thought like that.”⁷⁴ On October 12, 2009, The Daily Show featured a montage of cable news hosts abruptly ending uninterrogated political “debate” between surrogates from the left and right, concluding: “we have to leave it there.” The camera cut to Stewart, incredulously asking: “why would you leave it there? There is a terrible place to leave it!?!” Stewart went on to explain how the cable news shows neglect their responsibility to play “arbiters of truth” in an effort to appear “objective”: “it’s called ‘balance.’ It works like this: Basically you get two crazy bald people [cut to reveal Democratic strategist James Carville and Republican operative Ari Fleischer] one representing the right and one representing the left and since those are the only two functional and rational points of view, the anchor [cut to reveal CNN’s Anderson Cooper] helps them come to a golden consensus. [Cut to montage of shouting match between Carville and Fleischer which Cooper interrupts with ‘We’re going to have to leave it there.’] Leave it where? [Pleading] I don’t even know where we were!” Stewart often explored the trouble with so-called media objectivity. In a Daily Show segment about the media coverage of the allegation by Swiftboat Veterans for Truth that John Kerry had not served honorably in Vietnam, Stewart asked comedian-correspondent Rob Corrdry about the role of the journalist in examining contradictory claims:

The Daily Show, as it offered a critique of contemporary journalistic practices, also offered a remedy for those failures by scrutinizing political elites’ claims and challenging doublespeak and hypocrisy. The Daily Show produced a series called “MESS-o-potamia” dedicated to satirical takes on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, often juxtaposing past comments by President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with the administration’s present positions to illustrate arguable hypocrisy, dishonesty, or opportunism. It also featured interviews with journalists, politicians, and experts, with whom Stewart would try to unpack the underlying logic for the United States’ involvement in the Middle East (photo 3.3). While civil and playful, Stewart’s interviews were not the softball interviews politicians would typically expect from a late-night comedy host. Stewart often pressed his Democratic and Republican guests on their talking points, asking them to go beyond their practiced sound bites, something to which they were clearly unaccustomed.

So, while Stewart’s humorous segments offered satirical critiques of contemporary news practices, the show also created a template for the alternative: Pushing beyond the information from the White House. Scrutinizing the dominant narratives of elites. Asking questions that were simultaneously respectful but challenging. Jeffrey Jones summed up the role played by The Daily Show through the years of the Bush administration this way: “it was the confluence of these two forces—masterful information management techniques and fear-mongering by the Bush administration and a television news media that helped facilitate these political deceptions and ruses through its weak reporting and tendency toward patriotic spectacle—that made The Daily Show the perfect vehicle for interrogating the truth.”⁷⁶ By the time Stewart left the show in 2015, it had earned two Peabody Awards and won the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Series for a record 10 years in a row.⁷⁷

In the interest of intellectual honesty, though, I cannot ignore the fact that, for all of Jon Stewart’s substantive critiques of the failures of journalism, he never actually explored the systemic reasons for those failures. His critiques often suggested that journalistic failures were the responsibility of journalists or the fault of “the cable networks.” But he didn’t explore why cable news fails in the ways it does. He never tackled media deregulation or the consolidation of media ownership. He never discussed the conundrum posed by journalism being charged with serving the public good and simultaneously being squeezed for corporate profit. He never discussed the democratic threat posed by five megacorporations owning the nations’ entire media landscape, or the fact that his own network, Comedy Central, was owned by one of them (Viacom). This always bothered me. If you’re going to go there … why not really go there? Maybe it was the fact that his network was part of the corporate media landscape. Or maybe he thought that the abstract nature of corporate media ownership couldn’t be easily mined for comedy. I must note that in recent years, John Oliver (on subscription-supported HBO, owned by AT&T Warner Media) and Samantha Bee (on advertiser-supported TBS, owned by AT&T Warner Media) have both tackled the troubling economics of investigative and local journalism. Oliver (perhaps liberated by the absence of advertisers) has dedicated entire segments to issues like the dangers of corporate consolidation and the failures of corporate for-profit journalism.

I write in such detail about Jon Stewart’s time at The Daily Show because of its profound influence on the contemporary satire genre. Not only did the show establish the template for television satire, but it served as an incubator for some of the most popular and critically acclaimed talent in the genre. Daily Show correspondent Stephen Colbert launched The Colbert Report, his ironic parody of a conservative pundit show, in 2005. Stewart cocreated The Colbert Report with The Daily Show’s head writer, Ben Karlin. Stewart also served as the show’s executive producer until its last season in 2014, when Colbert left to prepare for his new role as David Letterman’s replacement on CBS’s flagship late-night program, The Late Show.

The Colbert Report was an entirely new genre of television programming. Performed totally in ironic persona, four nights per week, Colbert’s show offered an O’Reillyesque take on the news of the day but through a wildly underinformed, arrogant, faux-conservative lens. Colbert’s show featured interviews with journalists, academics, political figures, and authors, all while Colbert occupied the character of an ignorant but exceptionally confident egotistical pundit. As Colbert described it to NPR’s Terry Gross, he typically prepared interview guests backstage, telling them: “I do the show in character, and he’s an idiot, and he’s willfully ignorant of what you know and care about. Please just honestly disabuse me of my ignorance. Don’t let me put words in your mouth, and we’ll have a great time out there.”⁷⁸ The Colbert Report won the 2013 Emmy for Outstanding Variety Series, putting an end to The Daily Show’s winning streak and providing endless fodder for a fake dispute between the two show hosts.⁷⁹ The Colbert Report also earned two Peabody Awards (photo 3.4). Since Colbert’s CBS debut in 2015, Jon Stewart has served as an executive producer of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where Colbert continues to hone his skills as a playful, yet biting, satirist.⁸⁰

British comic John Oliver served as a correspondent on The Daily Show from 2006 until 2013 (photo 3.5). While Stewart was working on a film project in the summer of 2013, Oliver replaced him as host, proving that he had the chops to host a show of his own. In 2014, Oliver launched his own late-night satire program on HBO. His Emmy-winning weekly program Last Week Tonight is yet another iteration of the postmodern satire program. Free from advertising breaks and advertisers’ pressures, the show capitalizes on the work of researchers and writers to dive deep into lesser-known political issues. Oliver’s “investigative satire” has tackled such topics as for-profit universities, payday loans, net neutrality, and school segregation, earning the show a Peabody Award in 2014 and again in 2018.

For 11 years, Canadian comic Samantha Bee served as a correspondent on The Daily Show. In 2015, she launched her own satire show, Full Frontal, on the cable network TBS. The weekly program features political satire segments and interviews through an explicitly feminist lens. Tackling such controversial issues as sexual harassment, rape, and abortion, Bee’s show pushes the genre of television satire in yet another new direction, one that has evolved under the Trump administration—as I will discuss in later chapters—into a combination of feminist satire and outrage.

From network late-night shows to HBO, from Comedy Central to TBS, The Daily Show’s impact on the spirit and aesthetic of contemporary political satire has been palpable. Palpable and … kind of familiar. When asked about his comedy influences, Stewart consistently cites several of key players from the comedy landscape of the counterculture, including Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Steve Martin.⁸¹ The forum for the political satire of the 2000s was certainly different from that of counterculture satire (cable networks rather than smoky nightclubs). The specific targets had changed (Iraq and corporate media norms rather than Vietnam and social mores). Yet political satire’s ideology and aesthetic were—and still remain—very much the same. Just as Limbaugh and Hannity bear a striking resemblance to their forebears, the 1960s “hate clubs of the air,” today’s political satirists share the same liberal ideology and ironic hybrid aesthetics of the counterculture comics. As I will outline in the coming chapters, the tendency for liberals to articulate political critique through satire and for conservatives to do so through outrage is not a fluke. What if there really is something inherently liberal about satire and something inherently conservative about outrage—not as industries but as aesthetic forms that tap into and appeal to unique psychological characteristics—characteristics that are themselves tied to political ideology?