Rush Limbaugh is Correct. Stephen Colbert is a Liberal, While Jon Stewart Is Just a Progressive Era Reformer

Originally published in the Mischiefs of Faction blog.

By Jonathan M. Ladd

Last Thursday, CBS announced that they will replace retiring Late Show host David Letterman with Stephen Colbert, who currently hosts the satirical Colbert Report on Comedy Central. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh was outraged at the move, saying,

CBS has just declared war on the heartland of America. No longer is comedy going to be a covert assault on traditional American values, conservative values — now it’s just wide out in the open. What this hire means is a redefinition of what is funny and a redefinition of what is comedy and they’re blowing up the 11:30 format under the guise of "the world’s changing."

While I have no idea whether politics played any role in CBS’s decision, Limbaugh is right about Colbert’s politics. The editorial perspective of the Colbert Report is more liberal than any late night comedy show currently on the air, substantially more liberal than the Daily Show. To state the obvious, the premise of the show is to ridicule conservative pundits generally and Bill O’Reilly in particular. It is a spot on but not friendly parody, as illustrated by the adversarial relationship between Colbert and O’Reilly over the years. In 2006, four months after starting his show, he made news with an unusually biting anti-Bush monologue at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which was poorly received by the DC establishment. He has also testified before Congress about the plight of immigrant farmworkers after spending a day picking corn and packing beans on a farm in collaboration with a pro-immigrant group to raise awareness of the issue.


Colbert ran a remarkable 20 month long stunt in which he started his own super-PAC to illustrate the porousness of campaign finance regulations. Slate.com Supreme Court correspondent Dahlia Lithwick argues that “[Colbert’s] sustained, crazy, years-long assault on the Citizens United decision had no parallel in the national conversation with the court… Colbert became Exhibit A in the public effort to persuade the court that Justice Anthony Kennedy was wrong…” Finally, consider how Colbert describes his political perspective in a 2004 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross,
When I got to the Daily Show… Jon asked me to have a political opinion, and it turned out that I had one. I didn't realize quite how liberal I was until I was asked to make passionate comedic choices…
One criticism of Colbert’s current show is that the satire format inherently perpetuates the views that Colbert’s character espouses. Whether this satire produces the opposite of its intended effect on the audience is a testable question of human psychology that deserves its own separate post. I’m going to set that aside for now and focus here on the editorial viewpoint intended by the show’s creators. With the premature demise of Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell, the Colbert Report has the most explicitly liberal editorial viewpoint of any national comedy show. If Colbert continues on CBS his explicit ideological perspective accompanied by major publicity stunts on behalf of liberal causes, it would be unprecedented in network late-night entertainment.
Jon Stewart Is an Early Twentieth Century Progressive Era Reformer


One might object that surely Jon Stewart’s show is at least as liberal as Colbert's. Stewart expresses his viewpoints prominently and isn't bound by a restrictive satire format, which could be misinterpreted. His format allows him to directly state his views to the camera night after night. 

The difference between Stewart and Colbert’s political worldviews is that Stewart misunderstands how partisan conflict works in crucial ways. The main editorial perspective of the Daily Show is not modern liberalism, but a type of anti-partisan reform impulse that is always with us but probably peaked during the Progressive Era. Modern liberals often call themselves progressives because they think this is more popular label. However, reformers of the Progressive Era, which peaked in the 1900s and 1910s, were different from modern liberals. Early twentieth century progressivism encompassed a lot of disparate reform impulses, some of which contradicted each other. Yet one influential branch of Progressive Era reform centered on opposing corruption and partisanship in government and journalism. This led to opposition to urban political machines and to partisan control of nominations, as well as support for state referendum procedures and for professionalizing journalism. They thought more educated and nonpartisan journalists could referee and dampen political conflict, while increasing the public’s knowledgeability.

When asked in interviews what the biggest problem in American politics is, Stewart often says “corruption,” not the concerns of any of the major parts of modern liberalism, such as racial, gender and economic equality. In a nice symmetry, Stewart also describes his political philosophy in a Terry Gross interview, this one before a live audience at the 92nd St Y in New York City:
The [more] you spend time with the political and media process, the less political you become and the more viscerally upset you become at corruption. I don't consider it political, because 'political' I always sort of denote as a partisan endeavor. But I have become increasingly unnerved by the depth of corruption that exists at many different levels. I'm less upset about politicians than the media. I feel like politicians — the way I explain it, is when you go to a zoo and a monkey throws feces, it's a monkey. But when the zookeeper is standing right there and he doesn't say, 'Bad monkey' — somebody's gotta be the zookeeper.
Elsewhere in the interview, Stewart elaborates his views on partisanship and the media's proper role:
…in this room I would imagine Beck and Palin are easier punching bags. And we can think of it as, ‘Oh my God, I’m so scared if they take over.’ And you know what. We’ll be fine. We had a Civil War. We are not that fragile. I think we always have to remember that people can be opponents, but not enemies. And there are enemies in the world. We just need the news media to help us delineate. And I think that’s where the failing is: that the culture of corruption that exists in the media doesn't allow us to delineate between enemies and opponents. And I think that’s where we fall into trouble.

As sociologist Michael Schudson describes (and I discuss in my book), Progressive Era reformers introduced the “ideal of objectivity” into journalism. The most influential progressive advocate for journalistic objectivity and nonpartisanship was Walter Lippmann. In his 1920 book Liberty and the News, Lippmann proposed the following vision for journalism:
We need, first, to know what can be done with the existing news structure, in order to correct its grosser evils… While it is not necessary, or even desirable that every article should be signed, each article should be documented, and false documentation should be illegal. An item of news should always state whether it is received from one of the great news-agencies, or from a reporter or from a press bureau.
Later in the book, he elaborated:
With this increase in prestige must go a professional training in journalism in which the ideal of objectivity is cardinal. The cynicism of the trade needs to be abandoned, for the true patterns of journalistic apprentice are not the slick persons who scoop the news, but the patient and fearless men of science who have labored to see the world as it really is. It does not matter that the news is not susceptible of mathematical statement. In fact, just because news is complex and slippery, good reporting requires the exercise of the highest scientific virtues.
Stewart’s biggest political action was probably his Oct. 30, 2010 march on the national mall, which he conducted jointly with Colbert but where he was clearly the senior partner. At the very end of the day, Stewart took the stage to explain the political purpose of the whole thing. He said the purpose was to make American political culture more like cars entering a tunnel from New York to New Jersey, where social norms lead almost all drivers to patiently take turns entering.

Stewart thinks America’s most important problem is not inequality and injustice, but partisanship, incivility and corruption. When asked whether his 2010 march would hurt mobilization efforts by Democrats and liberal interest groups for the congressional elections just two days later (where Democrats would lose 6 Senate seats and 63 House seats), Stewart responded:

Tough shit. I have a job. I don’t have to do yours. I don’t have to do their job. Let them do their job. If their job is to motivate the voters and to rally people to their cause, God bless. Do whatever you've got to do. But that’s not my job. My job is to, again, express our point of view comedically about what we view as the political process. I have no obligation to the Democrats or progressives or liberals or unions. Our feeling is: corruption is corruption.

The view that partisanship and related corruption are our country's most important problems is not confined to Stewart and Progressive Era reformers. You can see similarities in the recent “No Labels” movement. The founding fathers hated parties and partisanship and designed the constitution with the goal of preventing them from developing. They also disliked partisan journalism and often spoke out against it, even though many of them sponsored partisan newspapers when it served their interests.

But most political scientists find this view of parties and partisanship misguided. Parties serve crucial functions in a democracy, including helping voters hold politicians accountable for past performance and reducing ideological chaos into a few understandable coalitions, which people can sort themselves into if they find that their current party disagrees with their most strongly-held opinions. V.O. Key argued that lack of party competition hurts the poor because, without the need to compete for poor voters, the wealthy have little need to take their interests into account at all. E.E. Schattschneider famously proclaimed that sustainable democracy is impossible without political parties, and counterexamples to this remain very rare.

Partisan polarization can certainly have bad consequences if, for example, political institutions are not designed to accommodate polarization or if one or more of the parties advocate extremely misguided and destructive policies. But remedies that seek directly to suppress partisanship tend to be either undemocratic, ineffective (at least in the long term), or have serious unintended consequences (such as referenda, which arguably just enhance the power of the wealthy and the well organized).


American journalism became largely nonpartisan in the mid-twentieth century after calls for reform by Progressive Era figures like Walter Lippmann. But, as I argue in my book, these few decades were an historical aberration made possible by the lack of party polarization and a legal and technological landscape that artificially restricted media industry competition. Beyond these few decades, partisan media are the historical norm in the United States. Furthermore, while not without problems, media partisanship has benefits. It helps partisan and ideological coalitions to deliberate over policy and presidential nominations, as well as to mobilize their supporters. Plus, a monolithic media establishment (like we had in the roughly 1950s through 1970s) makes it hard for any challengers to dominant political perspectives to get a fair hearing.

In sum, whether you agree with him or not, at least Colbert's editorial perspective is relatively realistic about how politics works. In contrast, the temptation to shun partisanship and its related "corruption," while tempting to many, doesn't in the end do much to improve politics.