How Stewart Made Tucker

A little unfocused but quite worthy piece framing today’s unloved news media environment as pretty much the product of internalizing and operationalizing every idea and critique the Adbusters-ass 90s had.

It’s frustratingly hard to pin down a throughline, but there are interesting themes: 1999 as the peak of an old media order marked by fantasies of replacing it all with something authentic; particularly Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show as a forerunner to the contemporary Fox News work of Tucker Carlson – the piece reminds that Carlson had actually been the “conservative” host when Stewart famously went on and denounced CNN’s Crossfire in 2005.

Like I say it’s a little under-edited though; it mixes lineages of innovation – Carlson, like Stewart’s TDS, is carried on cable and relies on a comedy-style writing room addressing subjects raised in detail elsewhere rather than a stable of journalists breaking stories; broader shifts in the economic context and how that played with things – increasing media options saw producers and advertisers going for particular niches, while Stewart’s idea of news for sensible, decent people envisioned an old-style mass audience, filtered on decency, which corresponds to no demographic useful to advertisers; and just general ways it ain’t like it used to be – internet search-targeted advertising is even more appealing to advertisers than broadcast, the ability to find and present archival footage was clutch for TDS – not actually bearing any weight in terms of accounting for how it affects anything else.