I love the guy and the courageous left-leaning progressive stances and slandering he’s doing to the you-know-who administration atm.
I think he’s up there with Ruby Setnik, Romesh Ranganathan and Stephen Colbert as my favourite leftist satirist, and his podcast is such a fun time-waster of a audio frequency too.
But I respect your opinion if you aren’t a big fan of his.
Have you seen what The Daily Show was before he joined? It was basically The Onion but on TV. He transformed it but for a long time TDS still was just a comedy show. Some people tried to put higher journalistic integrity requirements on them then the news shows themselves had. When they did, he pushed back saying “we’re just a comedy show” and he was right.
I would say things changed when John Oliver left and started his show which was designed from the start to do serious, in depth analysis of the topics it was covering. Other shows had to follow and get serious about fact checking. TDS also evolved and got better at it. I don’t know if Jon is still using the same excuse today. I haven’t seen any interviews or debates with him in recent years.
The one thing I remember is when he had a guest appearance on TDS and pushed the Covid lab leak theory. Which afaik is pretty debunked scientifically now and already was shaky back then (the honest take would have been “we don’t know”). I remember most virologists back then already said that there’s no evidence for it. And TDS has a pretty big audience, that does repeat its talking point regularily, so sure, you can say it’s just comedy, but people do listen to these things, it does influence public discourse and I did find it a bit irresponsible at the time. Especially since a lot of the show is about commenting on actual news.
Does this make him the devil incarnate? no. And some of the backlash for that one thing was way overblown. But then his reaction was mostly just saying how the backlash was stupid, and I would have liked a more nuanced/reflective response. If you have such a big platform, comedy or not, you should consider the effect of your words more carefully imo.
I remember that and it was weak. He’s not perfect but one mistake like that over such a long career is a close to perfect as you can get. He has been incredibly solid on most topic for decades. If more media personalities had his integrity we would be living in a completely different world today.
Yes. Just to be clear, I do think he overall has a pretty good track record, from what I know. I certainly don’t follow him religiously and especially since Trumps second term I have very little interest in US late night TV, too much US on the news anyway. That was just the one instance that comes to mind. Also the one instance when I was worried that he might start to boomer, though luckily it seems that was not the case.
Some people took the Colbert Report literally.