Bias With a Basis: Stewart vs Beck

Neutral, unbiased, nonpartisan news is dead.  It’s just not a good business model anymore.  MSNBC and Fox News have proven this by kicking CNN around in the ratings more and more each year.  However, this isn’t really a new problem.  Media has taken sides and chosen favorites since the beginning of U.S. history; one of the most famous goes all the way back to America’s origins, in which a pro-Federalist paper declared Thomas Jefferson to be dead in the hope of detracting support from him.  It puts the current harms of media bias in perspective; at least when Fox pushes the Obama-is-a-Muslim conspiracy they acknowledge that he’s alive.

The real danger of today’s media is not the bias, but rather the way we access it.  With resources like Google, Twitter, Tivo, and Hulu, we now have the ability to watch whatever we want, whenever we want.  As the success of Fox News and MSNBC makes clear, individuals consume media sources that advocate viewpoints they already agree with.  In essence, the internet age, often claimed to herald a new age of communication and information- sharing, has also provided us with the means to construct our own personal, impenetrable echo chamber.

How do we save ourselves from this bubble?  Since a nonpartisan media seems  beyond hope, perhaps we can strive for the next best thing:  bias with a basis.  If we are going to give up news that is actually fair and balanced in favor of coverage that is “fair and balanced,” we should at least seek to have that coverage be based in fact and reason.  The result may be a public that is partisan and political, but in the end it will at least be informed.  However, contemporary news faces a dichotomy between this bias based in reason and bias based in bull, and no media personalities personify that divide better than Jon Stewart and Glenn Beck.

Despite his self-appointed label of “fake news host,” Stewart dishes out a heavy dose of real journalism in his reports.  For years, a staple of his style has been to catch politicians, commentators, and members of the media contradicting themselves by playing conflicting quotes in succession.  It’s hard to pick a single program that doesn’t contain at least one of these “gotcha!” moments.  The coverage is undeniably liberal; President Bush was a far more frequent victim than President Obama is today.  However, Stewart is at least giving his audience an argument that is based in facts.

Contrast this approach with Beck’s.  Each and every day, Beck constructs the narrative of his show around conjecture and speculation.  Instead of looking to facts, figures, quotes, and clips, he instead relies on his magic blackboard of truthiness, which allows him to chalk out whatever line of reasoning he wants, evidence be damned.  The Glenn Beck Show strives to achieve the lowest common denominator:  speculation itself is the end goal.

Perhaps even more important is the difference in how the two hosts value discourse.  It is a fair critique to say that Jon Stewart vehemently pushes liberal beliefs.  But no one could ever argue that he refuses to engage the other side.  On a regular basis, Stewart will host guests who are highly conservative.  And he won’t just bring on fringe Republicans for the sake of knocking them down; he takes appearances from individuals such as Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and other leading conservative figures.

Beck, on the other hand, is averse to ever hosting liberals or having someone appear to advocate for their viewpoints.  The most prominent Democrat he ever brought onto his show was recently resigned Congressman Eric Massa, but this was only because he thought Massa would accuse Democratic leadership of forcing him out of office because of his stance against healthcare reform.  When Massa took personal responsibility for his resignation and instead used his airtime to critique the Tea Party Movement, Beck grew irritated and ended his show by declaring to his audience, “I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time.”

For perhaps the only time ever, Beck was right.  He did waste everyone’s time: he ignored a genuine opportunity to engage someone who disagreed with him.  Jon Stewart never does, and it is that type of discourse that makes Jon Stewart’s programming, biased as it is, still a highly valuable source of journalism.  He is confident enough in his views to put them up against a capable adversary who wants to argue against them.  In doing so, he challenges not just himself, but also his viewers, to put substance behind their stances.  He forces his liberal-loving audience to question why they think they are correct and conservative principles are flawed.  And quite often he is forced to concede that it is not possible to do so, and that all we have is our own opinions.  It is the ability to provide that reasoning – on both the right and the left – that makes even a biased media one worth having.

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