Rhetoric on Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity

This post will be a continuation of the general theme found in my previous post and my newspaper article in The Munice Star Press: rhetoric in real life. The particular topic of this post is on one show’s coverage of The Rally to Restore Sanity.

I haven’t kept track of all the links, but everyone (from talkingpointsmemo.com, salon.com, the New York Times, Fox News, Chris Matthews and I’m sure many others) has conveyed at least some, if not outright, disapproval of Jon Stewart’s rally. As you can tell, there is not just a left/right divide here. If you’re interested in the full length points being brought up, searching Stewart’s name on the particular website will bring up the relevant stories. Below, I will summarize what the gists of the criticisms.

Some of the arguments include: 1) the media is doing the right thing in focusing on these big, divisive issues (Matthews); 2) the media doesn’t have the impact Stewart says it does (NYTimes); 3) there was no true point to the rally (salon.com).

My understanding of the rally’s impetus and argument goes as follows: 1) CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News all use fear to get people to watch their shows 2) if things were truly as bad as they say they are, we’d all be dead (from bed bugs, STD’s, alcohol, and all the health warnings to Marxists, Muslims, terrorists, progressives, fascists and all the horrible people, who ‘we’ of course aren’t) 3) we should realize that we do get along and working with people does not mean the end of everything we ever believed in. In sum: “These are bad times; they are not endtimes.”

But all of that is prefatory to my main point which focuses on a brief segment on the Sunday edition of Fox and Friends on Fox News. I will provide a link here, as I want you to watch the rhetoric in action for yourselves. Its up to you if you watch it first, and then read what follows, or conversely, wait to watch it until after you read what I have to say.

This show, Fox and Friends, is not news. It is speculation at best, misleading on a neutral view, and deliberately misleading at worst; the clip typifies their approach to “news”. They say a lot of things and rather quickly, so I have brought up four main points each of which has at least one direct quote that you can find in the video.

1) The woman pointed out that they were comedians parading as “newspeople.” This is an immediate attempt to discredit any relevance the rally may have had. Her logic: if they’re comedians, they have nothing valuable to say. Of course this is almost entirely false; many, many comedians speak about important issues and usually convey, through their medium of comedy, opinions worth contemplating; George Carlin is paradigmatic in this regard. She must not have gotten anything from the great Greek comedic playwrights either. But more to the point, her rhetoric is inappropriate because comedy, to work, must make reference to a shared meaning. A person who does not get the meaning of a joke doesn’t laugh. In other words, the listener must understand the meaning being conveyed in order to discover the comedy found within it. Ever notice how you don’t laugh at a roast when you don’t know who the person is? This is because you don’t have all the background information on the roastee and so the meanings of the jokes are lost on you. Of course Stewart’s and Colbert’s version of comedy is satire, which is, albeit a circuitous one, one of many ways to make valid points. Yet this woman acts as if satire is no more relevant than a forth-grader’s opinion on state politics.

2) Gretchen Carlson then acts as if she doesn’t remember Colbert’s name or the name of the rally. Again this is a backhanded way to discredit any validity the rally may have. There is no way a news anchor (who is true to the title) would forget a name in a story. And even giving the benefit of that doubt, there is no way a news anchor would forget the name of a person they’ve played clips of countless times on their show and who’s show has a nightly national crowd of 1.5 million viewers. This point is the most pathetic one. Check here for Stewart’s bit on her “playing dumb” on an earlier topic.

3) Crowd estimates have become a big deal lately, starting with Glen Beck’s rally. As a result, Stewart and Colbert were preemptive and mentioned that it was pretty likely that the numbers would be distorted: Colbert had an early morning tweet that said he heard an estimate of 6 billion in attendance… So, knowing all of this, the smug gentleman on the left doesn’t even mention an estimate (because if he was accurate, he’d have to say that it was more than Beck’s rally, but if he underestimated, he’d be ridiculed by Stewart the next day. So he proceeds to go at the subject in a more subtle way. He only mentions that “we’ve heard some various estimates”. From this, the viewer, has no idea how big the crowd was… no idea. What the viewer does recognize is that there are several estimates, which presumably disagree and so what ever number I might hear on some other network must be an exaggeration which is obviously slanted to a liberal bias. Its genius really. All he has said is true, but certainly leads the viewer toward an obvious conclusion, which is that there weren’t that many people, not matter what number you hear.

4) He mentioned that there were “political overtones …….. to vote” Notice how long that pause is and what effect it actually has. The only overtones Stewart had was “to vote” but if he leaves it at “there were political overtones” one is led to believe that Stewart was overtly anti-right. And later, he goes on to say that the rally was overall, against the tea-party. Again, while no parties were mentioned at the rally (and the message was mainly against the media), the anchor leads the viewer into the opinion that it was overt and largely derogatory when he says that the signs “seemed kinda crazy”. He conflates the signs at the rally with Stewart’s message. But if you never saw the speech, you would think it was Stewart going on and on about how bad right-wingers.

What is perhaps most significant here is the fact that these 4 points I just covered were all brought up in the first 43 seconds of the clip… and all before a single second of the video was shown. My last two points are found later in the clip and refer to 1) and 2) from above:

They again mention that the two speakers were comedians when they says that they “actually tried to be serious”; presumably this occurred only once, given the rhetoric’s implications. This is furthered when she mentions that Stewart looked “fancy in a suit”. Of course, Stewart and Colbert wear a suit for every show. And lastly, the speakers were comedians “so it had to be funny”, which again dismisses any validity that may have been found in the rally. What is perhaps the most ironic moment in the show occurs when their news correspondent for the rally was listed as a “conservative comedian”. They mention about 5 different times that comedians are only worth laugh at, and yet their correspondent was a comedian.

Lastly, the only number they did point out was the number of people the Huffington Post bused in: 10000 people (which is an estimate). So while they refuse to mention any number about total attendees, they do mention how many people they believe were bused in from New York by a liberal newspaper. But because they never give the total number, which was estimated at well over 100,000, 10,000 seems like a ton of people. Of course, it was at least less than 10%, but without mentioning the other number, the 10,000 stands out.

To be fair, they do raise a good point, pertaining to the use of Cat Stevens, at the end of the clip.

This general topic will probably become a regular theme for this blog as it has really begun to get on my nerves when watching news shows. News is about reporting; but sadly, when the reporters shade the stories with misleading commentary, viewers take it as just reporting, and are illinformed about those topics that at the heart of the story in the first place. More importantly, this all shows just how important our words are when we communicate, and this holds for all aspects of life, not just punditry.