“What a f***ing week.”
That was Jon Stewart’s exhausted conclusion on this week’s edition of The Weekly Show, his podcast that acts as an in-depth companion to his Daily Show gig. “I can’t even get into the Late Show, Daily Show of it all,” he sighed. He instead pointed listeners to check out Monday’s episodes of both Stephen Colbert’s show and his own — “I think you’ll get a sense of how we’re feeling and just how tenuous this moment is.”
That didn’t mean Stewart was ignoring the moment. “Oddly enough,” he began, “our episode today is about levers of power and coercion from the government and how they use their power to manipulate and to get what they want and to force people into authoritarian tendencies.”
Don’t Miss
While Stewart did plenty of sounding off on Monday’s Daily Show, he hadn’t had the opportunity to react to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who jumped off the top rope later in the week with a less-than-statesmanlike response to Colbert’s dismissal from CBS. “The partisan left’s ritualist wailing and gnashing of teeth over Colbert is quite revealing,” Carr posted on his Twitter/X account. “They’re acting like they’re losing a loyal DNC spokesperson that was entitled to an exemption from the laws of economics.”
Stewart couldn’t believe it. On top of everything else Colbert and friends are dealing with, now comes shitposts from the FCC? “The FCC chair!” he exclaimed. “The guy who is responsible for this is just out there like, ‘Yeah, motherfucker, how does my ass taste?’”
Government trolling its own citizens sucks, said Stewart, but the bigger effect of networks paying off the government with eight-figure settlements is even more insidious. What’s happening goes beyond Carr and even the current administration.
“By the way, it predates Trump,” Stewart noted. “Ron DeSantis suing Disney, I have been in those meetings with executives who have said to me, ‘Look man, we don’t want to get on their radar.’ There are a lot of things that will never be made, that you will never know about, that will be killed in the bed before they ever had a chance because of this chilling effect.”
As for the content that’s currently being made? Stewart reminded his corporate overlords on Monday that there’s no $8 billion merger without the provocative content created by programs like The Daily Show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and South Park. “What made you that money are shows that say something, shows that take a stand, shows that are unafraid,” he argued.
And yet, he knows it could all soon come to an end. As Stewart concluded on last week’s Weekly Show podcast, “They may sell the whole fucking place for parts. I just don’t know.”
Source link
