The media should listen to Jon Stewart's critics

Trust in the news media is at an all-time low, and the problem isn't liberal orthodoxy. The problem is "terminal bothsidesism"

All hail Jon Stewart, skewer of hypocrites, assassin of evasions, and wry observer of obfuscations! After a decade, he has returned to The Daily Show on Mondays to offer this trenchant observation of the presidential race:

“Biden’s lost a step, but Trump regularly says things at rallies that would warrant a wellness check,” Stewart said in his first episode back.

Wait, what? Is Stewart actually going to lay to waste the false equivalence of Biden’s advancing age with whatever the heck is going on with Trump?

Actually, and weirdly, the answer is no. Stewart smoothed over Trump’s profound and obvious mental, emotional, and intellectual challenges to fit him nicely alongside Biden. Stewart said Biden and Trump “are both similarly challenged” and “they're objectively old.”

“We have two candidates who are chronologically outside the norm of anyone who has run for the presidency in this country, in the history of this country,” Stewart said of Biden, 81, and Trump, 77. “They are the oldest people ever to run for president — breaking by only four years the record that they set the last time they ran!”

Jon Stewart has aged into a left-of-center Joe Rogan.

Ha, ha. They’re old, get it? Stewart has aged into a left-of-center Joe Rogan, mistaking provocation for perspective, and if we’re mad, it’s because we can’t handle the truth. “It was never my intention to say out loud, what I saw with my eyes, and then brain,” Stewart said in response to his critics.

But the biggest problem isn’t that Stewart has become unfunny, prickly, and self-righteous, though admittedly that’s suboptimal. The biggest problem, and one neither he nor the journalism profession has adequately addressed, is that he’s hiding behind the intellectual version of his fake news desk: the false equivalence of bothsidesism.

This, and not the “jokes” about age, is why liberals and some media critics whacked him, as did Slate’s Sam Adams, for “offer[ing] little more than his ’90s brand of snark and bothsidesism.” MSNBC host Keith Olbermann called Stewart “a bothsidesist fraud.” And Mary Trump, the former president’s niece and a prominent critic of same, wrote, “Not only is Stewart’s ‘both sides are the same’ rhetoric not funny, it’s a potential disaster for democracy.”

To which, Stewart replied, “We're just talking here!” Stewart eschewed self-reflection, instead recasting the problem as liberal intolerance of debate. “But I guess as the famous saying goes: ‘Democracy dies in discussion,’” Stewart said in his second episode, referencing The Washington Post slogan, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

Stewart’s hiding behind the intellectual version of his fake news desk: the false equivalence of bothsidesism.

And then Jon Stewart said something that really warrants a wellness check: “We're not suggesting neither man is vibrant, productive, or even capable.”

Actually, I am, at least as it applies to Trump.

Trump not only mistook the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a test to detect dementia or cognitive decline, as evidence of his intellectual abilities — which it unintentionally turned out to be, I suppose — but now he’s back out on the stump, bragging that he was able to identify animals on the test, including whales. According to the Canadian neurologist who invented the test, the test has never included a drawing of a whale.

In a Sep. 15 speech, Trump called Biden “cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead” before warning that he had America on the verge of World War II. In the same speech, in referring to his 2016 electoral victory, he said, “We did it with Obama.”

UPDATE: And yesterday at CPAC, Trump referred to his wife as “Mercedes.” In the same speech, referencing Vladimir Putin’s stated preference for Biden to be re-elected, Trump said, “He did announce the other day that he'd much rather see Biden as President. And I agree with him.”

We’re talking about a guy whose Christmas message on Truth Social began “Merry Christmas to all” before listing grievances and concluding, “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS.”

I am absolutely¹ saying Donald Trump is not capable.

And yet even an article about Trump’s “Is Grampa OK?” yammerings is couched in Trump’s sustained political attacks on Biden as enfeebled and polling showing Americans think that these two old men are really damn old. In other words, bothsidesism legitimized by polling.

OK, what are you feeling right now? Are you frustrated by the bothsideism? Or are you shouting at your phone or computer screen right now, saying, “But Jason, Biden is really old!”

Yep. No argument there. Leaving aside for a second the actuarial dangers of hiring either of these codgers for a high-stress, long-term job, we do have data points for valid comparison:

There was the time that Trump was president and a million people died just in this country because he took an airborne virus as a personal insult, driving the country into a recession. There was also an armed insurrection, a fitting capstone to four years of the horse in the hospital.

And then there was the time that Biden was president, when we actually had Infrastructure Week and passed the first bi-partisan limits on guns in a generation. What chaos there has been has been reliably supplied by the House Republicans, who, when not publicly displaying Hunter Biden’s dick pics, are not doing much else besides making Nancy Pelosi look retroactively like the best Speaker in American history.

The false equivalency is, well, false. And ignoring Biden’s successes to focus relentlessly on his age is as misdirected and outdated as interviewing white working-class voters in a Pennsylvania diner.

Part of the problem here is the firehose paradox posed by Trump: the prosecutions, the lawsuits, the promises of dictatorship, the professions of admiration for other dictators, the nine-figure judgments, the slurry word salad served on the stump, the embrace of a 16-week national abortion ban “because it’s a even number”… We are all Lucy and Ethel at the conveyor belt, unable to process the giant, steaming mounds of Trump coming at us too quickly. And every time a reporter tries to catch his or her breath to say, “Hey, this is historically and objectively nucking futz,” that welcome bit of level-setting perspective is upset by the next pile of Trump headed our way.² And brother, that ain’t chocolate.

So if there are any journalists still reading, let me make this very clear: The problem isn’t that you’re not covering the really bad stuff or that you’re normalizing or minimizing it. Lies are getting called lies. Anti-democratic statements aren’t being on-the-one-handed. And critics aren’t being infantilized as hysterical, presumably because you all believe what’s in your own papers.

The problem is that negative news about Trump is being equated with the fact that Biden’s lost a step, which he unquestionably has, and this is being elevated with no consideration for his actual performance in office. It’s a matter of proportion on par with Trump’s daily lunacies being “balanced” by fair-minded focus on how Hillary Clinton used a private email server at home for sensitive work matters.

The effect on voters is obvious. The conservative media machine hypes the attack, and Republican voters fall in line, spiking polling numbers that reflect concern. The mainstream media falls for this bad-faith pattern, again, and Biden’s team, recognizing this attack for what it is, refuses to grant reporters unfettered access to the President, because every time he goes out there, all he’s asked about are Questions Being Raised about his age. And so now the story is, like with the emails, why Biden’s hiding and not being transparent about his age.

Concerns about Biden’s age serve another purpose. Contemplating another Trump presidency forces self-selected serious people to revisit the fun-house fear, the “he-can’t-really-mean-what-he-just-said-oh-now-what-did-he-do” of it all. To soberly assess the danger he poses is to follow the nightmares to their logical, if terrifying conclusion. Simply repeating what Trump says is crazy-making. Saying that both Biden and Trump are too old for this shit is comparatively soothing.

Of course liberals are pissed. Centrists are gaslighting us, and the press has refused to look in the mirror after 2016. Instead, after four years of rising subscriptions and engagement thanks to Trump’s bombardment of clickbaity news, they kept right on in 2021, hyping a recession that never happened and leading a majority of Americans to believe otherwise.

Leading voices in journalism would have you think otherwise.

I get this all the time. Any time I criticize political coverage to political reporters, they discount my feedback because I’m a liberal. I used to make my living in Democratic campaigns, and for much of the last decade I’ve worked for a liberal, Democratic mayor and then for large urban school districts. Journalists discount my criticism because I’m biased professionally and ideologically. Meanwhile, they strive furiously not to be called the liberal media by Republicans while they reinforce the defensive ramparts of self-righteousness.

There is a big exception. Chris Cilliza, who as a CNN reporter in 2016 seemed obsessed with the Clinton email story, recently showed an admirable capacity for self-reflection about how he erred:

What I got wrong in 2016 was how I viewed Trump. I thought that, sure, he was an unconventional candidate but, like, how much damage could he really do?!

I didn’t grasp that Trump represented an existential threat to American democracy. I never could have imagined back then that January 6, 2021 was even the remotest of possibilities.

I think my coverage reflected that incorrect assumption. I treated the Clinton email story as, basically, on par with the various allegations swirling around Trump. …

Given what Trump did in office — most notably his blatant disregard for norms and, um, laws — that was clearly not the case. Yes, Clinton’s emails were a story. But the story was the threat that Trump posed.

I didn’t go a good job of making that clear to readers — both in what I wrote about Clinton and what I wrote about Trump.

Going forward, he promises to do better.

That Joe Biden is old is not an issue on par with the fact that the guy he is likely to run against tried to overturn a free and fair election in 2020, incited a riot to prevent the counting of electoral college votes in 2021 and is promising an authoritarian-adjacent 2nd term if elected in 2024. … I think I should write more about Trump than Biden because he would represent a radical change in how presidents behave and operate if elected again. Plus, he is currently under four active indictments!

Outside of that, I have not seen a real reckoning by the news media for bothsidesism. Instead, they are always fighting the last war and focusing on the wrong thing. They focused on emails instead of taking Trump seriously and Pennsylvania diners during a resurgence in the women’s movement that lead to the 2018 blowouts. All things being equal, the press covered the chaos of the 2020 election cycle pretty well, but in the runup to the 2022 midterms they were hyping a coming red tsunami that proved as real as the recession.

Consequently, trust in the news media is now back to its all-time low set in 2016, and Jon Stewart, who has perhaps lost a step since he quit The Daily Show in February 2015, doesn’t get what the problem is.

“We don't live in an era where pretending both sides are the same is good for America. We need more thoughtful criticism and comedy from people with the kind of platform Jon Stewart has, that takes into account what's really at stake,” wrote Mary Trump.

What’s really at stake is whether we survive as a constitutional republic, which is something that worried Michael Gerson before he died in 2022. As a speechwriter for the Bush/Cheney campaign and then for the Bush White House, Gerson is credited with some phrases that survive in contemporary memories, including “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and “the armies of compassion.” Less favorably is his “Axis of Evil” remembered from the run-up to the Iraq War.

What he really should be remembered for was his horror at how his fellow evangelical Christians accommodated Trump, whose “fundamental unfitness for high office” bothered Gerson. He saw the conservatives he’d worked alongside for decades tie themselves into knots, justifying Trump’s shortcomings by pointing at Marxist professors and their censorious students.

Gerson, who died after a decade-long fight with kidney cancer, wrote the following words less than a year into the Trump presidency and less than a year before his passing:

“If the American experiment dies, the cause will be terminal bothsidesism.”

Those are the words he should be remembered for. I just hope they won’t be on our country’s tombstone.

Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.

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1. the fuck

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