Comedian Jon Stewart admitted recently that the establishment media likely “squandered” trust with the American people by incessantly pushing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative throughout the president’s first term.
Stewart revealed his thoughts about the issue on his podcast The Weekly Show when speaking with MS NOW host Ali Velshi.
“I think within the media, it gets back to — you talked about it earlier — you said, ‘It’s about what you earn with your audience.’ And I wonder if, in media, they’ve squandered some of that based on those incentives,” said Steward.
“So, for instance, we’ll go back to, like — there’s always that rush of, like, ‘Now we’ve got Trump, and the Mueller report, and it’s Mueller time,’ and all these things,” he continued. “And the hype machine that generates that, whether it was for action in Iraq or accountability through these special counsels — that it raises an expectation of its audience.”
Velshi called that very hype machine a “dopamine rush” that ultimately led to nothing. Stewart likened it to a hamster wheel that ultimately numbed the audience.
“The more you run on that hamster wheel, or gerbil wheel … I wonder if that begins to numb your audience to consequence. And is that where the trust has been lost? That not only is it about holding to account, but it’s about tempering their expectation,” Stewart said.
Velshi said that the media should be less focused on making it seem like “the world’s on fire all the time” with constant hits of “breaking news.”
“It can’t all be about this is the thing that’s going to take Trump down, because, actually, your goal needs to be more important and more sustaining than taking Trump down. It needs to be fixing our society as it relates to incentives in media, as it relates to poverty, as it relates to healthcare,” said Velshi.
“There’s a real danger in associating everything with Trump, because Trump will go away,” he added. “And you’ll still have all these problems. And you’ll still have this movement of 35% of Americans who trust nothing and want to tear it all down. We have to fix the system. And that means people understanding the system and understanding their role and their agency.”
