Jay Leno, former host of The Tonight Show, came out recently to criticize the current late night scene. Part of his criticisms involved how every late night show is doing the same Trump routine on repeat. Late night TV (like most of America) is obsessed with Trump, so it’s not an unfair critique. The other half of his criticism comes from a different place. He’s not too high on the lack of supposed civility in late night. He’s not wrong per se there, late night doesn’t hold much back in its criticisms of Trump and his administration, with the exception of Jimmy Fallon who tries his best to not rock the boat with politics. But it’s the unapologetic nature of late night that has refreshed it in the public consciousness, and the reason people gravitate to them is the same one repealing many from the actual news.
People define civility in different ways. For some, it’s just politeness. For others it’s making sure to argue in a calm manner and not flipping over tables. On the extreme its code for when people don’t want to talk politics at all, usually defining politics as anything that makes them uncomfortable. But for the mainstream news media, it’s became something of an ever tightening noose.
There’s no doubt that late night is as polarized as the rest of America. Tune in to any episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the opening monologue is sure to be about Trump in some way, and it’s the same for any other late night talk show. There’s always been a symbolic relationship between the news reporting what’s going on and late night riffing on it, but the dynamic has changed in the recent few years under the Trump presidency. The news is still trying to report like everything is normal, late night is pulling its hair out to show how much it isn’t.
It’s no secret the mainstream news media is under attack like they never have been before in America. Not a day goes by that Donald Trump doesn’t bash on the “unfair,” “totally biased” “enemy of the American people.” Reporters keep their cool about him regardless, not daring going too far over the line. Most keep a stoic stare at the camera or toward their fifty person guest panel. They talk in their coded language, like Van Jones’s famous ‘whitelash’ comment on 2016’s election night. It was him saying that Donald Trump’s election showed ‘white America pushing back against the changing demographics of the country,’ which is a very polite way to say the country still has a lot of racists in it.
While one expects there to be a figurative wall separating our real news reporting from our comedy recap of said news reporting, it is astonishing to watch how starkly the two entities react to our current environment. And that clash could be seen in all its rawness with the White House Correspondents Dinner 2018.
Michelle Wolf hosted the dinner, and it was brutal. Most of it wasn’t very funny, but it wasn’t supposed to be. It remains one of the most honest rebukes of Trump and his administration on any mainstream stage, and it showed how afraid the press is of seeming like they’ve stepped off the fabled high ground.
The press corps by and large condemned Wolf and flocked to the side of Trump and friends, even with the New York Time’s Maggie Haberman coming to the aid of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a woman who has done nothing but degrade the press in her sham briefings since her start as Press Secretary. It’s like someone running from a burning house, only to run back into the flames because the first person they see outside asks them, ‘What the fuck is going on here!?’ It scared them so much they didn’t even feature a comedian host at the upcoming 2019 dinner, breaking the years long tradition.
It’s hardly a new problem. Hunter S. Thompson wrote that one of the reasons Nixon was able to rise to power in the ‘70s was due to “objective journalism” attempting to stay stone-faced and report on everything as normal even in the face of abnormality. While traditional reporters may have wrote troubling things about Nixon, Thompson was actively on the road calling out the fascist tendencies Nixon showed in ways the mainstream press wouldn’t dare.
Little has changed, it seems. While they may be masked in jokes, late night talk show hosts are ringing the alarms. John Oliver does deep dives into worldwide spreading authoritarian tendencies, Bill Maher keeps a checklist of dictator moves Trump makes he updates regularly, Jimmy Kimmel does focus groups where Trump supporters have to explain themselves face-to-face to Dreamers, Stephen Colbert does a mock Now That’s What I Call Racist CD setlist featuring all the bigoted things Trump has said since announcing his candidacy in 2015, and we could go on and on.
The likes of Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon can only talk about ‘racially charged language,’ ‘disturbing tendencies’ and whatever from the grab bag of softened news-speak. Occasionally, you’ll see a CNN or MSNBC host in a heated exchange with a Trump surrogate on their 192-man panel, but it’s the tamest stuff and little more than bait for grandpas and uncles to share on their Facebook under a video labeled ‘Trump supporter gets OWNED.’
It’s not that I think reporters need to take improv classes or jump on their desk and screech that Trump is Nazi scum in their best Lewis Black impression, or that it’s good that people get news from comedy shows (and comedians hosting those shows will be the first to say that’s a terrible idea). But it’s that unwillingness to even go in those waters, to compare Trump’s rhetoric directly to Hitler’s, or even just to outright call Trump himself the obvious bigot that he clearly is that makes it all feel hollow. It’s that stark difference that’s renewed America’s interest in finding places that are going to state the obvious. After all, try to think of a segment that reached the mainstream for a talk show before the Trump years. Unless you are a devote follower of those shows you probably can’t think of many. And in regards to Jimmy Fallon, who has done his best to stay in apolitical waters, he’s lost a large audience share to Colbert and Kimmel. The lack of civility is the best thing that’s happened to late night since Carson.
In the end, it sounds like I’m knocking the mainstream media, and I suppose I am. But I’d also argue that, in large part, this is something they’ve done to themselves. Of course the issues of our news media goes behind civility. There’s all kinds of weeds we could get into there, from the corporate takeover of the press, to the years long demonization of it by the right, to the need for access but, at least, partially the noose tied around the free press’s neck has its rope in its slavish need for a calm face even when their house is on fire.
Let’s be honest, both the news and late night benefit from Trump in the end. I’d wager most of them are secretly hoping Trump does get re-elected to keep their ratings up. But it does go to show how upside down the world is, and why so much faith is being lost in our news. The truth seers can only speak through gags while the jesters are the only ones talking in plain language.
Photo: Iain Watson