In a recent poll conducted by Time Magazine, Jon Stewart was voted America’s Most Trusted newsman over names like Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson, and Katie Couric. Normally, such a result would present a fallacy in American intelligence: a self-proclaimed comedian who makes a living satirizing the news being heralded as the best at delivering said news. However, at least in Stewart’s case, an exception should be made.
Ever since The Daily Show with Jon Stewart first aired in 1999, its host has repeatedly called out politicians and other public figures for their shortcomings, acting as a watchdog of sorts for the general public. Stewart uses what seems to be a crackpot team of researchers to dig up anything and everything they need to in order to expose someone’s hypocrisy or to just plain embarrass them.
Even though Stewart denies that his show is a reliable source of news, his importance has grown steadily as the years have gone on as his audience has slowly begun to become more receptive to his ideas. Now, with the country arguing on an issue as divisive as healthcare reform, is the time for Stewart to use this public standing for the good of the country. However, he can’t do it all himself. He still needs someone to be his triggerman, and that person is Barack Obama.
The recent “Tea Party” protests have been a field day for satirists such as Stewart and his even more liberal counterpart Bill Maher, and in their coverage of those events, they have called for the President and Congress to come down hard against the mass hysteria riled up by Hard-line conservatives like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. They have spoken, Obama has (hopefully) listened, and now it’s time for him to follow through.
We have proof that the President has the ability to put definitive punctuation on an issue as well. One might think of his colorful description of hip hop artist Kanye West in off-the-record comments about the rapper’s controversial interruption of the Video Music Awards as a bit of a training course, preparing him to take on the loonies that have popped out of the woodwork overnight across the country.
The fact is that Stewart and Maher’s jobs just shouldn’t be this easy. If they turn on any given news channel, they’ll see people calling Obama a socialist and a fascist in the same breath while claiming that czars and community organizing groups like ACORN are part of a plot to destroy democracy and capitalism. That’s the kind of material that keeps on giving and frankly it has to stop.
What the President needs to do is to address every issue these protestors have brought up head on. He could just copy down all of the outrageous claims written on signs onto a sheet of paper, get a camera and a teleprompter ready, and go down the list saying “That’s actually not what’s going on, here’s why” in regards to each point.
It seems impractical and a fairly large waste of time on the surface, but the unrest being caused by events like the Tea Party protests is swelling every day it goes on. If it’s left unchecked, it will become something too large to ignore and much too large to handle.
