Understanding Culture Wars through Satirical/Political Infotainment TV: Jon Stewart andThe Daily Show's Critique as Mediated Re-enactement of the Culture War

Abstract

Recent US culture wars have been waged through televised entertainment news (infotainment TV). The imprint left by Jon Stewart and The Daily Show on mainstream news outlets has been analyzed in political communication studies and media studies. However, no one has so far made a case for Jon Stewart as a protagonist in these culture wars, especially because Stewart himself wants to stay clear of and set himself apart from them. This paper looks at the performativity of these culture wars in infotainment TV as the medium and locus where the culture wars are waged. While I recognize the crucial role played by Jon Stewart and The Daily Show in critiquing news-media coverage of American politics, I nevertheless contend that Stewart can also be seen as a culture warrior, albeit an unwilling one, and that, by giving him a voice, the medium of infotainment TV is turning him into such a warrior. My argument is predicated on the belief that satirical/political infotainment TV is an important locus of the culture wars and must be studied carefully because it plays a political role in mediating their re-enactment. Using this news-media satirical form as epistemological grounding, I first focus on how these culture wars play out in satirical/political infotainment TV and show that infotainment TV, because it is mediated as such, both critiques and re-enacts the culture wars and affects the American journalistic mediascape. I then examine satirical infotainment TV as political practice.

Stewart, O’Reilly, and The Rumble 2012: Alternative Political Debate in the Age of Hybridity

“…On The Daily Show, Stewart delivers a regular rebuttal to the more extreme and hypocritical output from Fox (Stelter, 2010), while he himself has risen to near-heroic stature among the progressive left. Grondin (2012) suggests that Stewart's engagement with Fox News helps to construct the very "culture wars" that O'Reilly celebrates and Stewart bemoans. Arguing that the culture wars are more "entertainment and political spectacle" than a set of "genuine political issues," Grondin maintains that political-entertainment television programs have become Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 11:52 26 November 2014 "the medium and locus" for their performance (pp.…”