NEWS FOR THE NEXT GENERATION
The Kids Are All Right
Young People and News: A Conversation
Jon Stewart is not a journalist, but he plays one on TV. Stewart is the anchor and lead writer for The Daily Show, the mostly satirical program on Comedy Central. Stewart plays with the news in a way that has captured the attention of young people. Robert Love is a magazine journalist who, before he left it in June, spent twenty years at Rolling Stone, working with writers from Hunter S. Thompson to William Greider to Eric Schlosser. CJR asked the two of them to get together and talk about the connection — or lack of connection — between young people and the news. The following is an edited version of that conversation. They spoke in Stewart's office, cluttered with dozens of newspapers and magazines that Stewart says he uses "for kindling."
LOVE: When your marketing department took out that ad in The Wall Street Journal and said "more eighteen to forty-nine-year-olds get their news from The Daily Show . . . ," how did that make you feel?
STEWART: I actually never saw it, so I don't . . . [Laughs] People say that occasionally — "Studies show . . ." But I have never paid much attention to studies showing anything, which is probably why I still smoke bacon-flavored cigarettes. Occasionally they do send you demographic breakdowns, but for the most part it's kind of a meaningless exercise. Our show runs on an internal barometer. Last night we did a five-minute bit on Henry Kissinger. I don't imagine that's an eighteen-to-thirty-four interest point.
LOVE: But you assume the audience knows Kissinger, right?
STEWART: We didn't assume total knowledge of Kissinger. So it did have more of a didactic tone in that we had to explain Kissinger more explicitly.
LOVE: Butcher of Cambodia, et cetera?
STEWART: I don't believe we used the word "butcher" but . . .
LOVE: You know in my world, in magazines, there's been a sea change recently. And one of the things that happened is that the idea of long articles is now disparaged in many quarters. Instead you have to have multiple sidebars on a page. And that's the way to talk to young men and women these days. Do you feel these sorts of changes in publishing as a consumer of media, and in news media particularly?
STEWART: No. The sea change that I've seen is that there's just more. There's just more of everything.
LOVE: I don't know if you've seen these two new youth papers out of Chicago, Red Streak and RedEye. They are a kind of youth McPapers done by the Trib and the Sun-Times, strictly to bring about an increase in readers they weren't getting to. And they are always leading with pop culture and very short stories from the wire services and stuff. It looks like it's tailored by old guys for young guys.
STEWART: That's what I'm saying. I'm not sure
that it makes sense for anybody to tailor something specifically
for a younger audience. You know, we don't think on the show
like, "You know, the kids love the pot references. We're
definitely gonna throw those in." We are on our own internal
barometer.
If the idea is to get young people interested, I think young people are pretty interested. As much as anyone else is.
LOVE: The reason for our discussion is that there's a lot of hand-wringing about things that polls tell us. For instance: that twenty- to-twenty-nine-year-old daily newspaper readers — the number has fallen by half.
STEWART: But newspapers are not the only medium. They used to be. I'm sure there was a time when they were saying, "You know, only half the people get their news from town criers that used to." Technology has moved on, and there are an incredible number of resources and avenues to get your news from. In the '60s you had three networks doing fifteen minutes a night. The amount of information that people are getting now is so overwhelmingly larger.
LOVE: I noted that in an interview once you used the word osmosis.
STEWART: Yes. They soak it up. I think the larger problem is
the amount that they have to wade through. The problem is not
in getting the information. The problem is, who has the information
of record. Who can you trust to provide you with information that
is useful to you, because you're surrounded by junk.
I don't think this is a generation that's less engaged. I don't think there's more apathy. I don't think anything of the kind about these kids.
LOVE: Do you think they're better informed then previous generations by having all these different outlets?
STEWART: Well, it's different. Better informed — about what? Certainly about music. Maybe about pop culture. Are they better informed about geography? I don't know. I mean, I have to say, I know my parents. I know my parents' friends. They're not fucking geniuses, I'll tell you that much.
LOVE: But when they give tests to kids these days about geography, they really don't know where Brazil is.
STEWART: My guess is that years ago, the rote memorization part of education was stronger. People probably knew where Brazil was back then. But they were also given a plate of history that was almost strictly objective and not a glimpse of the subjectivity of history. So, were they better informed? Yes, they knew where Brazil was. Did they understand, though, how the colonization of the subcontinent was, you know, a colonialist nightmare? No.
LOVE: I would be happy if they knew the history of the colonization of Brazil. But I…
STEWART: I'm not saying they do. What I'm saying is by making the argument that they don't know how to spot Brazil on a map doesn't necessarily mean they're less engaged in the world. Is there a baseline of information that would be great for people to know? Probably. Could schools do a better job of that? Absolutely. But does that make kids today less engaged, less interested, less informed, dopier? I completely disagree with that.
***
LOVE: I'm worried about the blowhard aspect of talking about "Youth and News." But things have changed. Audiences have changed. Newspapers are changing. Magazines . . . I was personally caught up in it. And one of the things I think that happened is that the business guys, they do surveys.
STEWART: Right.
LOVE: So at Rolling Stone the surveys always say the same things. Random Notes is read the most. Charts and letters. All the easy, nonchallenging things.
STEWART: Sure.
LOVE: So some place along the way, some business guy says, "Well, if they love that and they only read 50 percent of the long articles, why don't we give them all that?"
STEWART: Right. Look, nobody is sitting down with Rolling Stone saying, you know, "I really need to learn more about what's going on in our world, so I've gotta pick up a Rolling Stone." That magazine is like a lot of cultural magazines. People skim them. But part of what's nice about magazines is having longer articles and more interesting articles. Random Notes and those things give you the luxury of being able to include the other. If you don't ground something in a certain relevance, ultimately it becomes unsatisfying to read.
LOVE: Yes.
STEWART: The main goal here is to do the funniest show we can do. Yet it's more fulfilling for us to do a show about things we care about, so that's why we infuse some news and issues in there. It's our internal barometer that creates that. Now if we put naked women on the show and such things, more people would watch it. But that's not what we're doing.
LOVE: You're the author of the show and you have a vision of what the show is. And it includes people like Kissinger and Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, and —
STEWART: Right.
LOVE: So I guess what I see happening is, too much of the other way of thinking — all naked females or all light, fluffy things. You said something interesting, that you wouldn't go to Rolling Stone to read about something weighty. Well, I think you used to. I would be delighted to see an article in there, for example, on autism, which I did in the late '70s, early '80s. I knew that with the sensibility of Rolling Stone's writers and editors, they would have their way of doing that story. It would be a different article than, say, an article about autism in Life magazine.
And so there was a feeling that this magazine could encompass the music and everything else the music touched, as well as other areas of interest.
STEWART: Sure. I guess my point though is that the magazine form in general is — you know, there's a reason why they're in the waiting room at your dentist's office. They are unbelievably well-packaged, pretty, laminated things that you can get interesting little bits and bites from as you go along. And that will always be a part of it.
Now within that, there will be larger, longer-form things. And that's where I think the responsibility can lie for a more actualized magazine. You can draw people in, and once they're there, provide them with something that you really think is important as opposed to what you just think will sell.
LOVE: Right. I like what you said. That there's just the show that you put on, and it is based on your vision. And it's about having fun and doing good work or work that somehow includes things . . .
STEWART: That you care about.
LOVE: Yeah. That you care about.
***
LOVE: You know, there's a fellow named Jon Katz who writes about journalism and technology quite a bit. And he's talking about a true paradigm shift: all the ascending media, he says, is interactive — "my AOL"; "my MTV." People are going on the computer and they're getting just what they want. The idea is that we have embraced interactivity in terms of the media. What do you think?
STEWART: I'm not sure what that means. In terms of millions
of people, the network news still far exceeds anything on CNN,
and I wouldn't consider CNN or Fox interactive. I mean, you
do Insta-Poll — "Should Slobodan Milosevic be tried
for war crimes? Our Insta-Poll says yes." You know? But that's
what radio stations have always done. "Be the seventh caller
and you'll get a ticket."
Television is a passive medium. People like to sit. People work all day. People don't necessarily want to work to get their information and entertainment, you know? Watching a game on TV is always gonna be a pleasurable experience. But I don't think people necessarily want to watch the game and then click on Number 77 to see where he was born.
The Internet is really exciting in terms of research and maybe communicating with certain people that you haven't been able to communicate with. But there are phones. You know? And so far, nothing's beating television's ass, and film.
LOVE: You're thinking of the Internet more as just a delivery system.
STEWART: That's exactly what I think of it as. How long have we been hearing about interactivity? What does that mean? You know, why would you want to interact with a television show? What does that mean? As far as I can tell nobody has given me a reason to interact.
LOVE: Okay. I suppose that the idea is ultimately content on demand. You don't just watch Seinfeld, you watch Program Number 234.
STEWART: Okay, but then TiVo should be the revolution. But I guess what I'm saying is, it's still not a revolution. That's a different way of packaging and delivering the programs. The programs were the revolution. How and when you watch it is just a variation on that.
***
LOVE: So you don't buy this idea that there's a disconnect between youth and issues of the day?
STEWART: Isn't that what youth is? I mean, I don't understand why that's unusual?
LOVE: [Laughs] But I guess youth used to vote, and they don't now.
STEWART: Well, we need to have a draft. I mean, there was something that really mattered to them. They might have had to go to Vietnam and be killed, you know? The disconnect is probably that youth don't pay taxes and older people do. But guess what? Older people don't really vote either. Everybody doesn't vote. You know, voting since the early '60s has been way down for everybody.
LOVE: About half of all eligible people vote. It drops off to 25 percent of those eligible in what we would call a youthful demographic.
STEWART: Look, I don't think it's an issue of people not caring. I think that very clearly government and corporations have set up a system that is purposefully obtuse, that is very hard to penetrate. And what they count on is, as you begin to penetrate it, it slowly begins to lower you into a sort of hypnotic state of unawareness. Because they know, for the most part, you have a life to get back to.
I think the problem with the media is they've forgotten their role. Politicians and corporations have figured out the system. And now media and journalists and everything have to figure out how to become effective again.
When Nixon went against Kennedy in a debate and they didn't
really know what television was all about and Nixon went on sweaty
and Kennedy went on powdered, Kennedy won the debate. Well, now
they all know how it works. And they've figured out how to
get around it. So now the offense has gotten better than the defense.
The defense better get together and figure out how to become more
effective. And to me, that will engage people as a matter of course.
I mean, you also have to remember there is a certain social contract
here, that news has to have a somewhat higher calling.
LOVE: There's the crux then, because with the large corporations demanding a better bottom line every month, you've got to be an organization that is anything but bottom-line oriented.
STEWART: But that makes an assumption — that you can't
make a profitable yet good product. For some reason, everyone
has decided louder is more profitable. I believe that that's
not the case. For some reason, people think that solid, good,
in-depth all equals dull, low ratings, low profitability. I don't
know that, you know? I don't think that's the case.
I think you can make really exciting, interesting television news
that could become the medium of record for reasonable, moderate
people. And I think it hasn't even been tried, quite frankly.
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
