How Have The Daily Show and The Onion Covered Conflict in the Past?
By Chris Faraone
Although the results of some surveys suggest that Americans flip from MSNBC and Fox News to the ostensibly less partisan CNN when major tragedies and conflicts surface, other research shows that people are completely full of shit, and that they mostly just watch reruns of the King of Queens. In reality, Farmville has 20 times more active players than the New York Times has paid subscribers, while hundreds of dailies and weeklies fold each year. It's a depressing cliché, but the stench of sociopolitical ignorance in 2013 suggests that most folks get their news from tweets, chitchat, and comedic outlets — if they bother at all.
This phenomenon has aggravated a handful of so-called real reporters for some time. From the World Trade Center attacks to the percolating drama in Syria, certain journos and media types have expressed outrage over how jesters from mock news orgs pitch heavy if not radical messages while claiming that their audience should know that they subscribe to a code of comedic — not journalistic — ethical conduct. With that said, select gripes aside, hacks typically sympathize with the satirical consensus, which is usually easy since our two primary fake news sources — The Onion and The Daily Show — magnify our liberal biases.
After so many years of their taking satire seriously, though, the current conflict in Syria has finally revealed the utter inability of even top media critics to distinguish mirth from news. In a column from last week titled, "This Jon Stewart episode is everything wrong with how we talk about Syria", Max Fisher of the Washington Post goes so far as to suggest that stoners will decide who gets bombed: "Stewart may be a satirist but he's influential and trusted," writes Fisher, "particularly among left-leaning Americans, who have been split on the issue and who could play a significant role in deciding whether Congress gives President Obama the go-ahead."
Neither Stewart nor The Onion have changed their schtick in recent weeks, or really ever. Nevertheless; their seemingly disparate views on Syria – the former's alleged hawkishness; the latter's perceived isolationism – have caused a rift in the comedy-time continuum, with even the otherwise reliable On The Media team at NPR asking, "Why is Syria flummoxing American satirists?" Preposterously, contributor PJ Vogt suggests that the "comedic polemic might just not fit the topic, which is so sad and complicated." As for The Onion's coverage: Vogt compares it to "the case for war as understood by a neocon college Freshman."
It doesn't take a mirror to see that Vogt and his peers are reflecting their own confusion over Syria. The Onion and The Daily Show both often take extreme positions; likewise, they've always been reliably crass. As such, the more pertinent question is, "Why are satirists flummoxing the media over Syria?" For answers, we looked at their faux-reporting on past conflicts — the invasion of Iraq, Rwandan genocide, others — to prove that their Syria remarks are funny business-as-usual, and that the rest of us are simply paralyzed because we rarely face a false choice between America's Finest News Source and the Most Important News Show... Ever.
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