Not Competitors

On Tuesday, July 16th, Bill O’Reilly sat down with Jon Stewart for an interview and debate on The Daily Show, the most recent episode in a shouting-match-slash-love-affair the two men have dallied in, on and off, for the past two decades. The last time the two squared off was 2014. Since then, O’Reilly left his cable show amid allegations of sexual misconduct, opting to stream his program independently online. After retiring from The Daily Show, Jon Stewart made an abortive attempt at a second-act directing career, before slinking back to his old gig. They’re far from the cultural forces that once shaped the contours of Bush-era America. What was striking about their latest debate, though, was not so much what had changed but what had remained the same. To hear the two men speak last Tuesday was like stumbling upon a conversation preserved in amber, unchanged since the interlocutors were in their prime.

The topics of conversation ranged from inflation to O’Reilly’s streaming service, but the focus was how the news media should talk about political issues, especially in the wake of the recent assassination attempt against Donald Trump. This is a recurring theme for the two showmen, the endless renegotiation of what the media should or shouldn’t say and how it should or shouldn’t say it. “There is a selective outrage machine here at Fox,” Stewart told O’Reilly in 2011. “Stop monetizing your anger,” he repeated on Tuesday. The difference between these two comments, made twenty years apart, was almost entirely in the delivery. The Stewart of yore would flash indignant that O’Reilly and Fox News were profiting from right-wing outrage. On Tuesday, Stewart threw out the line as a friendly wisecrack—we’ve all heard this before, no surprise here! The line was greeted with a peal of laughter from the audience, and O’Reilly just kept on talking.

If Stewart and O’Reilly have changed, it’s that they’re now much more willing to acknowledge their position within the media ecosystem. Here Jon is on his first appearance on the O’Reilly Factor in 2004. “You and I are not competitors,” Stewart told O’Reilly, in response to his accusations that Stewart’s comedy genuinely influenced the politics of his young viewers. Stewart would protest throughout his career that he was not like the opinion-mongers of Fox News—his program did not actually inform his audience’s political leanings. (Perhaps most famously, he denied that his show was partisan in a pointed exchange with Tucker Carlson on Crossfire: “You’re on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.”) This argument became increasingly difficult to make over the years as Stewart’s brand of smirking, disaffected humor came to dominate the liberal mainstream.

O’Reilly, for his part, also rejected the position of political tastemaker. Throughout the run of his Fox News program, O’Reilly branded his show as the “No-Spin Zone,” a cut-the-crap truth-teller amid a symphony of PR mouthpieces. Though Bill was undeniably a right-wing operator, he always marketed himself as a no-nonsense tough guy, someone who was Just Asking Questions. In the past, both Stewart and O’Reilly refused to call themselves political pundits, even as their shows had an undeniable effect on our political discourse. Their interview on Tuesday came with an acknowledgement that perhaps they had been wrong to do so. “You and I are both somewhat fossilized practitioners of the rhetorical arts … we made a really spectacular living pushing those envelopes,” Stewart told O’Reilly on Tuesday, responding to Bill’s claim that the media needed to tone down its rhetoric in the wake of the Trump assassination. The comment was an implicit acknowledgment that Stewart and O’Reilly were both part of the news media, which they had long claimed to be merely critics of. Both made their living shaping the way people think.

I was one of them. I started watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart with my dad when I was in elementary school. It’s hard to say how much of my politics was molded by Stewart specifically as opposed to living in the sort of liberal household that broadcasts the Daily Show to a fourth grader. What I took away from it wasn’t specific political opinions but a disposition to the world. Jon Stewart was a loudmouth, a rapscallion, someone more than willing to point out the ridiculousness of the world. My other favorite character at that time was Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes; like Calvin, Stewart went on extended, funny diatribes about so much that was wrong with the world. Both just as often ended up the butt of their own joke.

At his height, Jon Stewart was the master of puncturing inflated political egos with jokes; watching him made me, and many other viewers, want to do the same thing. But Stewart’s brand of military-grade mockery has now become the prevailing disposition in our politics. From the rise of Trumpism, which traded policy for owning the libs, to the recent accusations that J.D. Vance did unprintable things to a couch cushion, we’re all laughing as the country wilts.

By the time the interview hit social media, people were already complaining about Stewart buddying up to an alleged sexual harasser like O’Reilly. Others criticized him for giving O’Reilly a platform to spread his right-wing talking points. But while Stewart and O’Reilly disagreed on the substance of just about every topic, there is an undeniable affinity between the two, a grudging respect if not outright camaraderie. It’s not just that Stewart and O’Reilly occupied the same niche in the media ecosystem, just on opposite sides of the aisle. Stewart and O’Reilly needed each other the way the set up needs the punchline or the straight man needs the foil. The two men’s jobs required someone to argue against, and along the way they discovered they enjoyed each other’s company.

In a sense, this is the most outdated aspect of their conversation on Tuesday. In a political climate defined by genuine animosity between sides, O’Reilly and Stewart seem to like each other. At one point, Bill remarked “I have no friends here,” gesturing to the studio audience and Jon—in a full ball-busting form—replied, “Not just here.” O’Reilly shook his head and turned to the audience with a grin, “I’m giving him that one.”