Steve Almond of The Boston Globe Misuses Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" to Slam Jon Stewart
The Boston Globe, May 16, 2016
Steve Almond , the author of this Boston Globe column, misses two keys points, the first is related to his reference to Neil Postman, the second is about how the media enabled Trump's rise. Almond neglects to discuss the basis of Postman's discussion of politics as entertainment, that is, that as a presentational medium, television is biased toward the non-discursive and favors image over substance. Jon Stewart is not a cause of this bias, he is a result of it, and at best a critical reaction to the information vacuum left by the traditional news media being totally subsumed by the presentational prejudices of television.
Second, Stewart didn't enable Trump's current political dominance, the traditional media did by giving him billions in free coverage and by failing to adequately fact-check his assertions. Stewart's nightly broadcast served as a model for both media criticism and contrarian political analysis and could in fact be seen as the TV medium's attempt to remediate its most onerous effects. Stewart wasn't a Trump enabler, and if he failed to change the political landscape, it wasn't due to a failure of his vision or a lack of trying.
