Death of the Half Hour News Hour

Aww...now that's just a damn shame.

You know, I actually heard about this from a friend yesterday, and I've been thinking about _why_ the show is so horrible. Like trying to verbalize why Thomas Kinkade's art is such godawful mass-produced shit, it's actually somewhat of a challenge.

It's not that you can't make a conservative satire show that's funny, although doing so would be much more difficult in the past few years with a few conservative nutcases running the government and the more progressive forces, such as they are, doing exactly nothing. The reason Daily Show is funny is not that they tell left-leaning jokes, per se. The fun of the show is not in bashing their ideological opposites just for the sake of bashing them, and that is, I think, the piece that the Fox producers didn't get (I know...shocking that people at Fox News might have poorly developed analytical skills). If you watched Half Hour News Hour (and, god help me, I did), all they did was take sophomoric swipes at the usual right wing targets, e.g., Clinton (both of them), Pelosi, Reed, Kennedy, etc. All the jokes were basically of the form, "Hey, don't those guys suck? *self-satisfied chuckle*."

But Daily Show hasn't been successful and, frankly, _good_ because they just took pot shots at Bush, Rove, etc. Don't get me wrong, they did take pot shots. But what they were making fun of was the hypocrisy and incoherence of the public statements they made, not to mention the inherently comical oversimplifications they espoused to promote their ideologies. Certainly Stewart is liberal, and certainly his choice of guests and topics reflects this, but nonetheless the jokes didn't arise out of the fact that their targets were conservative so much as they arose out of the almost inherently laughable media spectacle those in power produced. When Bush responds to a question about the political feasibility of Rumsfeld continuing in his position by asserting that, "I'm the decider!", what's funny isn't as much that it's Bush saying it (though certainly that's part of it) so much as the fact that the leader of our country is responding to a genuine inquiry about the nature of our government with what amounts to, "'cause!" If Clinton had done it, they would have made fun of him too. When Democrats do stupid shit like that (see the clip of Clinton on her position regarding lobbyists I posted recently), they call them out too.

What I guess I'm saying is that the Daily Show has tended to focus on conservatives less because they are conservatives than because they're the ones most often saying indefensible, internally inconsistent, stupid shit. :)