JON STEWART – MEET ME AT CAMERA THREE!

Jon Stewart, The Daily
Show team et al. What are you doing to your English fans?
All right we may be a select bunch, not numbering many as audiences
go, but have you considered our influence? What British actor does
not come on the show and declare that they watch you in England and
praise your protestations? And for those in more humble professions
any number of teachers point their students to your show for
introductions to politics, satire, even English terminology, your
audience was building among the young people of these damp shores.
Perhaps audiences here were a little confused by the sudden breaks,
the four day regime, and the resolute failure to treat your show as
adult and place it beyond the watershed, but does that mean that we
must be cut off from access completely? That we must be fed the
edited highlights with no reference to our choices? Without your
take on American culture, us Britishers will very quickly succumb
to our prejudiced stereotypes: and those are that no one in America
thinks, that Fox News represents you all, that the talk is all of
war war and not health, or rescue or education. Throughout the life
of The Daily Show so far, you have upheld free thinking, free
speech, and you have challenged prejudice and mean spiritedness,
called out the fanatic and ignorant and made them either justify
themselves or exposed them as fools. All this was in the name of a
more democratic, culturally intelligent, debate. Your impatience
with the Senate, with the your government was a refreshing and
revealing take on our stereotypical view American life and yet…
and yet … now that debate…. that satire is now denied to the
British audiences. I appreciate that this may be a Channel 4
decision, that they choose to lock down their
contribution to satire in this way, I get that… but Comedy
Central is the arbiter of price and of internet permissions.
Internet access has long since been denied and now that
authoritarian mean spiritedness perpetuated by “the man” extends
not merely to Channel 4 but to you. The ethos of the show: to allow
freedom of comment beyond the confines of network constraints and
the pettiness of business interests, has been dumped with its
British audience, both on paid for terrestrial TV and online – and
that means, Jon Stewart, that means ….. that you too have become
….. THE MAN…….. and not in a good way! http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2010/12/stewart-daily-colbert-obama