Ted Koppel and Jon Stewart face off on the convention floor.

Friday, July 30, 2004

Because of our predilection (scroll down to Wednesday's entry) for watching convention coverage on the always-perverse MSNBC network, Surfergirl did not catch the much discussed balloon mishap that had CNN inadvertently broadcasting the shouted obscenities of a producer immediately after John Kerry's speech. If only it were possible to monitor all the channels at once from a wall-size bank of television monitors, like a crazy millionaire in the movies! But, as has been noted over and over this week, a modern political convention is a place where unexpected things like Balloongate very rarely happen.

One exception was Ted Koppel's surprising encounter with The Daily Show's Jon Stewart on the Wednesday night edition of Nightline. Koppel was in Boston that night, covering … well, the coverage; the theme of the show was "the Democratic National Convention through the eyes of the beholders." I had tuned in mainly to watch what was billed as an "interview" with Ana Marie Cox, aka Wonkette, the D.C.-based satirical blogger hired this week by MTV to attract the nerdy blog-reading demographic. As it turned out, Wonkette's appearance on Nightline amounted to little more than a 20-second sound bite—something about her Web site claiming to be no more than the journalistic equivalent of candy, albeit a kind of candy that "takes a while to acquire a taste for." (Mmm, gimme some.)

But after the commercial break, something unforeseeable happened on Nightline: an anchorman showdown! What began as a casual media-on-the-media puff piece turned into a fascinating five-minute referendum on old and new ways of looking at the meaning and purpose of television news. In a one-on-one chat on the deserted convention floor after the day's festivities had ended, Koppel, in his low-key, dignified, What-Me-Worry way, got medieval on Stewart's ass.

From the start, Koppel made no secret of his distaste for Stewart's show: "A lot of television viewers—more, quite frankly, than I am comfortable with—get their news from […] The Daily Show." His first challenge to Stewart: "You say that [the Democratic Convention] is like a product launch." "Not like a product launch—it is a product launch," Stewart replied, and proceeded to outline his take on Kerry's nomination as the result of a year-long process of corporate branding: "John Kerry: now with lemon!" A pretty standard line of argument for those of Stewart's generation, reconciled as we are to our postmodern condition as the constant targets of marketing and spin, but to Koppel, it must have sounded like the sheerest nihilism. As the interview proceeded, it became clear what a gulf lay between Stewart's and Koppel's views of the world, and it was heartbreaking to watch, like eavesdropping on your cool brother and your nice uncle as they pursue some hopeless ideological argument over Thanksgiving dinner.

"Unexpected things used to happen in the world. They don't happen anymore," continued Stewart matter-of-factly. Parried an impatient Koppel, "Oh, sure they do." Stewart was careful to separate The Daily Show's mandate from that of "real" television journalism: "I know my role. I am the dancing monkey." But that dodge didn't satisfy his broadcast-news interlocuter: "The reality of it is—and this is no joke—there are a lot of people out there who do turn to you." "Not for news," Stewart countered, and they were off again.

What was at stake in this debate between two men, a generation apart in age (Stewart is 42, Koppel 64), both of whom host some version of a late-night daily talk show on current events? Clearly, Koppel's beef went far beyond the question of whether most folks who watch The Daily Show do so for yuks. (As a long-term viewer, I would contend that of course they do, and that anyone who can't tell the difference between Stewart's out-there satire and actual investigative reporting is too dumb to understand the "real" news anyway.) No, the battle of the network anchors was about nothing less than the future of TV journalism.

Koppel, a venerable holdout from the era of the three-network system, stands up for the beleaguered notion of an objective truth that journalists can wrest from politicians, protect from satirists, and bring to the American public. Stewart, on the other hand, finds it "dispiriting" that broadcast news has become complicit with the prespun narratives coming from both left and right: "It's Coke and Pepsi talking about beverage truth." And yet Koppel is far from naïve— he quickly concedes that the convention-as-product-launch concept is "one I'd like to steal sometime"—and Stewart is no jaded Gen-X cynic. At one point, he even encourages Koppel to use the bully pulpit of Nightline to speak truth to power: "You can say, 'That's B.S.' You don't need humor, because you have what I wish I had, which is credibility and gravitas."

Wednesday night's discussion came to an abrupt end when Stewart, who was clearly ready to go on talking, was told by a polite but brusque Koppel, "You're finished." To my mind, Stewart (who, crushed-out fans like myself will be keen to hear, was looking foxy-fine in a casual black sweater and jeans) won the day. But I was looking forward to Round Two on Thursday, when Koppel was scheduled to be Stewart's guest on The Daily Show. Koppel never showed, and his absence went unmentioned. Last-minute scheduling snafu, or anchorman blood feud? A call to the Daily Show office to find out went unanswered, so I'll have to leave you to speculate on that one. What do you think I am, a news reporter?