Jon Stewart made his much-anticipated return to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show Monday. 710 WOR host Mark Simone is a fan of Stewart’s delivery and says he represents a bygone era of cable TV.
While discussing Stewart’s return Tuesday, Mark Simone argued that while he doesn’t agree with the comedian’s politics, Stewart is willing to do things very few others in the cable news space will even consider.
“Obviously, he’s a left-wing guy. He’s a Trump hater. He’s a Democrat, obviously. But people forget that back in the good old days of The Daily Show, he would every so often make jokes about the Democrats, make jokes about Hillary, he’d make jokes about Obama,” said Simone. “And this sounds really strange today. But if you went back 15 years ago, or 20 years ago, and you watched CNN, MSNBC, or any of these networks, they had people from both sides on at all times.
“I know this is hard to believe, but if you were watching Bill O’Reilly on Fox News 20 years ago, it was him debating Barney Frank, debating Bernie Sanders. He would always have the Democrats on and he would debate them. And if you watched MSNBC 20 years ago, 15 years ago, it was Democrats and Republicans debating each other. I used to be on MSNBC every day during the day. And every hour, they would have a panel debate for 10 minutes. Sometimes it’d be me and Rachel Maddow, she didn’t have her own show yet…I used to be on CNN all the time. They had both sides.”
Mark Simone then juxtaposed that former cable news situation to what is featured on partisan channels today.
“In today’s broadcasting world or talk show world, you just do one side. You don’t do both sides. Now why is that? Maybe we’re less tolerant. We can’t listen to you. That could be part of it. I think what it is when you go online to do stuff now, everything is a filter,” Simone argued. “You filter everything. In other words, you want to shop for clothes? You go to the website and you don’t say ‘Show me all the clothes you got.’ You filter it. I’m looking for pants, I’m looking for this color, I’m looking for this style and it just shows you what you want.
“So I think we developed that kind of mentality. Even when you go Amazon or YouTube. It’s got algorithms filtering for you at all times. It knows what you like. It’s only showing you what you like. So I think we kind of ended up doing that with everything with broadcasting as well. It just gives you what you want. Nothing else.”
