Entertaining Politics: New Political Television and Civic Culture (Communication, Media, and Politics)

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Summary: Entertainment and Political Discourse
Review: Entertaining Politics: New Political Television and Civic Culture by Jeffrey P. Jones (Communication, Media, and Politics: Rowman & Littlefield) (Hardcover)
examines humorous political talk shows on television-Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and Dennis Miller Live. This book challenges the assumption that these shows have dumbed down politics, as well as the idea that television in general is a primary cause of civic disengagement. By investigating the production, content, and audiences for such programming, Jeffrey P. Jones contends that these shows provide important alternatives to traditional elite political and news sources. He shows how these comedic political commentators have revived political humor as an accessible and potent means of political critique in times of postmodern crisis. Bridging the fields of political communication and cultural studies, Entertaining Politics makes the case for how and why popular culture is an increasingly powerful force in shaping our civic culture-and why this may be a positive thing.
Excerpt: When I first saw the program Politically Incorrect, I wasn't particularly en¬amored of it. I didn't disdain it like some of my colleagues; I was simply in¬trigued. Now here is something different, I thought, something that is overtly violating the implied rules of televised political talk. Although I never partic¬ularly enjoyed watching the Sunday morning talk shows or the shouting matches of the overly conservative hosts on cable television, they did define the standard. Here, though, was a comedian with a mullet discussing politics with the guy who played Batman on television when I was a kid. Say what? I, like other viewers, initially enjoyed seeing this odd mixture of celebrities from various public venues presented in a different light, hearing what they had to say and marveling at their intelligence, articulateness, or outright stu¬pidity.
But, as I watched, what increasingly became clear to me was that this pro-gram was not operating under the same linguistic or epistemological guide-lines that I had come to accept as the normative ideal in discussing politics. Instead, it sounded like political discussions found in most every venue out-side of the institutions of television or the university-shortsighted, ahistori¬cal, laced with the latest media buzz, prone to diverting comments, and gen¬erally dependent on the "truths" offered by personal experiences. It also was refreshingly honest, impassioned, diverse, stimulating, witty, and smartly commonsensical when push came to shove. Indeed, the prevalence of com¬mon sense as the primary means for thinking through and arguing political issues is what hooked me intellectually. I had previously studied Rush Lim¬baugh and his claim to commonsense thinking in the populist early 1990s, but his talk never seemed very commonsensical to me-it was just mean-spirited bigotry driven by fear.
As I began to watch, listen to, and study Politically Incorrect, however, I realized that this program, which had recently moved from cable to network television, was truly something different. Whenever I overheard conversation about the show or mentioned it to people outside the academy, I real¬ized that many of them enjoyed it for the humor, guests, and issues it de-bated. They seemingly didn't entertain the logic used in the dismissals of the show by political elites and cultural critics that this was some unholy mar¬riage of entertainment with politics, primarily because they didn't take it too seriously (which critics always did). At some level, they seemed rhetorically engaged in the conversation it offered as well as generally amused by this televised cocktail party.
This book, then, began as a project to study this program in greater detail, including my perceptions of a disjunction between audience appreciation for the show and academic/elite disdain for it. The project, however, changed considerably from its first appearance as a dissertation to include other programming from the same mold-Dennis Miller Live and The Daily Show. What's more, the world also changed during that process, beginning with a presidential impeachment and continuing through to election deba¬cles, horrific terrorist attacks, and stunning foreign policy initiatives. What became clear during this time is that what I call New Political Television-with its biting humor and satire and its honest and commonsensical talk by people not directly linked to the political establishment-has been a central location on television for the interrogation of political issues from a critical perspective. Here I have found voices on television that consistently ques¬tion and ridicule the patronizing lies, twisted logic, and taken-for-granted as¬sumptions of both government and news media in a time of crisis.
What follows, then, is an in-depth look at new political talk shows and their audiences, the humorous entertainment talk programming that ap¬peared in the 1990s in the programs Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, Dennis Miller Live, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. These shows, I ar¬gue, have challenged normative assumptions about who gets to speak about politics on television, what issues will be covered and in what manner, and how audiences can engage politics on television beyond simply deferring to expert knowledge. Furthermore, they challenge the boundaries between "serious" and "entertaining" programming erected in the network era, which increasingly have come to be seen as artificial. Finally, the shows have be-come a primary location for new public rhetors that consistently challenge the policies advanced by political elites and the sense-making on which those policies are founded.
In this process, the reader will note that I have attempted to bridge the fields of political communication and cultural studies-theoretically, methodologically, and rhetorically. Political communication and political sci¬ence's interest in civic participation and political norms, values, and cultureare linked here with cultural studies' recognition of culture as a complex process of meaning-making. By my reading, cultural studies has retreated from its early beginnings as a means of interrogating the relationship of cul¬tural production directly to the state. Similarly, political science continues to expend energy focusing on the formal political arena with minimal attention to the cultural factors that often precede political action. The traditional bounded nature of politics (culturally and academically) has transformed into a more porous position in media and culture, and our methods, ap¬proaches, and targets of analysis should reflect those changes.
I have attempted to be both expansive and narrow in my analysis, perhaps to the dissatisfaction of readers who are overly committed to one particular approach within these fields of study. Although I discuss Dennis Miller Live and The Daily Show as part of this move toward a hybrid genre of political talk, I have intensified the investigation of Politically Incorrect to examine the specificity of its production decisions, content, and audiences who watched it. And although I examine issues related to civic engagement, the focus is clearly on how this particular slice of television programming is a contributor to our overall political culture. Again, detail and specificity nec¬essarily sacrifice an analysis of a wider range of texts and a wider range of subjects in a book this size.