Jonathan Morris wants to make something clear. “At no time did we ever say that Jon Stewart is poisoning democracy,” says the political science professor, though you wouldn’t have known it from this summer’s ample media coverage of “The Daily Show Effect,” an article Morris wrote with his East Carolina University colleague Jody Baumgartner. Not long after the piece appeared in the journal American Politics Research, a Washington Post headline asked, “Jon Stewart, Enemy of Democracy?” while MSNBC’s Scarborough Country blared the graphic “IS JON STEWART A THREAT?”
As it turns out, a close reading of “The Daily Show Effect” reveals it to be decidedly less outrageous than the eye-grabbing rhetorical questions it inspired. Baum-gartner and Morris’ study found that, during the 2004 presidential election campaign, college-age participants were more likely to have negative perceptions about both parties’ candidates after exposure to Stewart’s satirical news broadcast. And while watching “The Daily Show” en-hanced the subjects’ confidence about their political knowledge, it also increased their cynicism toward politics and news media in general.
Of course, disaffected youth have been around as long as teenagers have, and since Baumgartner and Morris focused on subjects who ordinarily don’t watch the program, it’s unclear how the “Daily Show Effect” manifests itself in actual (largely left-leaning) fans of “The Daily Show,” whom your correspondent canvassed outside “The Daily Show”’s studios in Hell’s Kitchen one summer afternoon. “Jon Stewart preaches to the choir, not that there’s anything wrong with that,” says 20-year-old Mark, a rising college sophomore from Madison, who was waiting to attend a “Daily Show” taping. “It’s like therapy,” says Mark’s viewing companion Sandy, 19. “The world is crazy and Jon Stewart is like your therapist, helping you get through it.”
The anchor-as-shrink analogy recalls Philip Rieff’s 1965 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, in which he defined the “psychological man,” who shuns the messy realities of the public arena and turns inward to address his own interests and emotions. We might postulate that the psychological Stewart fan disengages from politics not out of selfishness or ignorance but out of a sense of helplessness—the kind of hysterical-in-all-senses incredulity that produces some of “The Daily Show”’s giddiest contact highs.
Jean Twenge’s recent Generation Me (Free Press) is just the latest book to lament the decline of interest in politics, activism and voting among young people. “They don’t see public service as a noble undertaking at all anymore,” says Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University. In this context of alienation, she says, “The problem isn’t necessarily criticism or satire of particular political figures but the overall attitude that it’s all pointless.”
It may be more instructive to see “The Daily Show” not as an agent of disaffection so much as a symptom of a larger psychological trend. In Generation Me, Twenge cites 40 years of data from a popular psychological scale that measures “internal” versus “external” personalities. “Inter-nals” feel that they are in control of what happens to them, and have confidence that ordinary citizens can make a difference in political and social affairs. “Externals,” however, believe that their lives are largely controlled by outside forces, luck and fate, and that citizens have little or no chance of influencing a world run by a very few powerful people—an attitude “The Daily Show” crystallized back in 2004 with their proposed theme for the Republican National Convention: “Fuck You, What Are You Going to Do About It?”
According to a study by Twenge and her colleagues, external control beliefs among college students increased by about 50 percent between the 1960s and the 2000s. By the researchers’ yardstick, the average college student in the early 2000s is more “external”—that is to say, more cynical—than 80 percent of her early-’60s forebears. The long-term effects of rising externality are clear and grim. “The impression is that there’s nothing I can do and it’s all going to hell, and you can see that in kids as young as 9,” says Twenge. “Some of it is actually realism and practicality, but some of it is counterproductive cynicism.
“Everything that externality correlates with is horrible: bad academic performance, depression, anxiety, alienation,” Twenge continues. “And yet the argument makes sense—of course we can’t all change the world. Certainly for young people who are left of center, this last presidential election was a lesson in cynicism.” Since Twenge’s Generation Me is akin to a big-tent Generation X, perhaps that epoch-defining aphorism from Slacker still applies: “Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.”
This article was originally published in The Village Voice from which it has been reprinted with permission.
Agents of apathy
Is Jon Stewart sapping our youth’s political will, or has it been missing all along?
C-VILLE’s resident TV expert weighs in.
It’s tough to argue with the findings Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan Morris publish in their report, “‘The Daily Show’ Effect.” You can question their methodology (um, 164 people in a national youth sample?). But when it comes down to it they’re probably right: “The Daily Show” is contributing to a growing cynicism in our nation’s youth, especially regarding politics.
So what?
Not to be a whiny brat, but what the hell do we have to be optimistic about? There’s a war going on—a war our president initiated that is deeply unpopular with the citizenry—that has absolutely no sign of resolution and which, thus far, has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Iraqis, 2,588 American soldiers and 230 “coalition” fighters. Our elected officials continue to play political shell games while funds are stripped from education and social services, and the national deficit continues to shoot up at a mind-shattering rate. (Guess who’ll get stuck paying for that, Baby Boomers?) And “ethically challenged” slimeballs like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove continue to run about with Cheshire-cat grins plastered on their pasty faces after literally committing crimes against Amer-ican citizens—crimes that, had they been perpetrated by a Democrat like Clinton, would have resulted in him being crucified and driven from office.
So yeah, we’re a little bit over the whole stupid, broken system. And that’s why we need “The Daily Show.”
As Jessica Winter points out in her piece, many “Daily Show” viewers see the program as a safe haven in a world gone mad—a place where we can joke about the fact that our global dependency on oil is very likely going to leave us pretty well screwed in a few generations. The other option is crawling under the sink and rocking in a fetal position. And being a Gen Y slacker, I don’t clean my bathroom often enough to make that option appealing.
Furthermore, it bears consideration that scrutinizing a TV program’s effect on an entire generation’s interest in politics seems specious, at best. There’s no doubt that TV, and the media in general, have an impact on how we view the world, and clearly the authors of the study aren’t arguing that “The Daily Show” is the cause of 20-somethings’ political aloofness. But suggesting that, just because Jon Stewart cracks wise about the sexual abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, somehow a college student won’t head to the polls, seems ridiculous. It brings to mind that minor pop-culture kerfuffle between Dan Quayle and “Murphy Brown” in the early ’90s (and I think we all remember who won that one). Here’s a thought: Maybe it was Abu Ghraib itself that kept that college student from stepping up to the ballot box.
And yet, even if “The Daily Show” isn’t to blame, it doesn’t do much to help what is, I admit, a pretty massive problem. Earlier this year I attended a dinner party at Gravity Lounge. At my table were four 20-somethings and an older couple whose ages I’d put somewhere between my parents’ and grandparents’. Some time between pleasantries and the second course, politics came up. We were all dirty liberals, and so we reveled in sharing our frustrations about the way things were headed. But, when the older couple asked what we were doing to change things, they were met with blank stares. Within seconds, they moved from chagrined to offended to just plain pissed-off. In their day, we were told, if you didn’t like the way things were, you got out and protested. You held rallies. You tried to change the system. And it wasn’t all sit-ins and flower power, either—some of these folks were hardcore politicos, and people on both sides got hurt, or worse. And what were we doing? Sitting on our smug asses watching “The Daily Show,” waiting for the world to change on its own.
But you really can’t blame “The Daily Show.” That’s on us and us alone. I honestly don’t think the old ways will work anymore; a walk on Washington isn’t going to accomplish much when the protesters are sequestered in a “Free Speech Zone” miles from the White House. We need to come up with something new. In the meantime, I can’t think of a better way to keep tabs on how screwed-up things are than to watch Jon Stewart manage to squeeze an ounce of humor out of Israel bombing the crap out of Lebanon.
Anyway, it sure beats crying under the sink.—Eric Rezsnyak