Over at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, Harry Enten took a look at the science, facts, and numbers surrounding The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart and confirmed what Breitbart News has been saying for years: that the elite media way over-hyped Stewart’s influence and impact when compared to his actual audience.
I’m sorry to be the skunk at the garden party — “The Daily Show” always had limited appeal; it just happens that the appeal included the New York media elite.
Stewart largely appeals to wealthy and well-educated liberals — a small slice of the overall news audience. …
Stewart, simply put, has been speaking to only a small group of people. You can see this in his television ratings. While it may shock some, the vast majority of Americans didn’t watch Stewart. Indeed, the vast majority of late-night viewers didn’t watch him. Last month, “The Daily Show” pulled in about 1.15 to 1.3 million viewers daily. Even if you include the roughly 250,000 viewers that, on average, watch “The Daily Show” on its website, Stewart’s audience is, at best, an average of about 1.5 million.
Read it all here.
From my piece last week:
Jon Stewart is the least man-of-the-people comedian America has ever seen. Though he disguises himself as a populist, in reality he’s a self-described socialist, who, for the last decade and a half, has sought and enjoyed unearned fame by playing a Court Jester perfectly-aligned with everything the Court of the Media Elite holds dear: Power over others, a monopoly on political speech, and withering attacks against conservatives.
In exchange for more than 15 years of constant reassurance that they are absolutely right about absolutely everything — from their flyover prejudices, to their love of Obama, to the righteousness of an oppressive federal government — the media offered Stewart an out-sized influence compared to his meager ratings. …
And because Uncle Jon always did what was expected of him — like use the current Brian Williams scandal as a vehicle to *yawn* bring back the good old days of Bush bashing, wished into the media cornfield was the fact that Uncle Jon regularly drew fewer viewers than Mike Huckabee and reruns of “The Family Guy.”
One of the great frauds of the last two decades was the mainstream media turning a low-rated leftwing comedian into a national sensation. Of course, it was all politically motivated. Jon Stewart said what the Left wanted him to say and in return the media made a coward and liar a wealthy and famous “truth teller.”
John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.