The Rise of the Knee-Cap Media

From Jon Stewart to Taylor Lorenz, we're witnessing the advent of the 600-word racing horse head in the bed & midnight visit from woke Luca Brasi.

If you’re like me and came up in the 2000s you’ve got a little soft spot somewhere in your heart for Jon Stewart. With his mastery of facial expressions—the blank stare, the sad-me, the holy-shit-shock look—and a sense for timing that could not be matched by anyone on late-night TV, Stewart was our news guys, the Walter Cronkite of the early millennial era.

So, for many of us, seeing Stewart ambush Andrew Sullivan on a recent episode with “The Problem with Jon Stewart” brought on a sense of shock and disgust. After all, if Stewart was our Cronkite, Sullivan was our Mencken—serious but satirical; erudite and, because of that, rooted in deep values; progressive-minded and, more than anything, open. Sullivan also was, and is, a media innovator, who created his own news and opinion company, The Dish, well before the rest of us were thinking of signing up for Substack.

It’s no use reconstructing what happened on Stewart’s show. You can watch the horrendous clip, which is about as appetizing as a slow-mo video of a running back getting his femur forced through his thigh by an overzealous linebacker. Suffice it to say that some Woke Warrior marched out the “You’re racist!” talking points to shut down, or in woke terminology, “erase” the debate .

Stewart played Ed McMahon to the woker, pulling out one of his classic Daily Show comedic gestures, the this-is-so-embarassing laugh into the fist, to egg her on. And then, far from returning the exchange to a place where a conversation might be had fruitfully, a place of openness and exploration, Stewart cemented the segment into the equivalent of the ideological lynching of a liberal gay man by telling Sullivan he’s “been doing a pretty good job” of making himself an anti-Black racist.

Stewart went onto preach about what Black Americans want and need, but the real question here is why he would risk ever having a big name guest of the non-woke variety on his show again—and it will be difficult to do here on in—by playing a stand-in for the views of a minority he is not a member of?

The answer lies in that last statement. Stewart has long been a vengeance-seeker on the issue of the day, whether that’s wage inequality, the patriarchy, conservative politics or the struggles of Black Americans as he perceives them. Under the cover of comedy, he would launch into a tirade mercilessly ridiculing anyone on the wrong side of his morality. Then, peeling of his Daily Show suit and donning his real-guy garb, he’d appear on CNN or Fox to scold others for committing the same sins.

But on nearly all the issues he champions, Stewart appears to be more part of the problem than the solution. Think about the long list of Daily Show correspondents who rose to fame under Stewart: Jon Oliver, Steve Carell, Mo Rocca, Rob Corddry, Ed Helms, Jason Jones, Jordan Klepper and, of course, Stephen Colbert.

Notice a pattern? With the exception of Samantha Bee, Stewart’s stars were all white and all men. Over the course of the 16 years he hosted the show, over which he no doubt had more creative control than any other stakeholder, how many Black correspondents or contributors did Stewart put on? The answer: Vanishingly few.

Perhaps Stewart’s impulse to nail Andrew Sullivan to a cross might have come from a place of wrathful guilt (a terrible combination of toxic emotions if there ever was one). But a more media-minded read is that he needs cover fire for his own identity, and his own actions.

To understand the significance of this, turn your attention to another media inquisitor, former New York Times social media reporter Taylor Lorenz. Lorenz—who rose from East Coast affluence to become a star reporter for the New York Times— recently gave a teary interview to MSNBC about being victimized by trolls online. And yet, you only need to scratch the epidermis of Twitter to find the trail of broken lives that follows in Lorenz’s wake.

Among them is a Jewish user of audio conversation app Club House named David Markovich who was subject to a prolonged assault by the non-Jewish Lorenz for, she baselessly claimed, supporting anti-Semitism. Lorenz also falsely claimed that one of the most illustrious names in tech, Marc Andreessen, used the r-word on a Club House conversation—a falsehood that could not stand more than a few minutes’ scrutiny.

Another example is a young Mexican-American entrepreneur named Ariadna Jacob who was the subject of a Lorenz hit piece that pulled the plug on the successful influencer business Jacob had started by alleging gross misconduct, very little of which appears to be substantiated. (Jacob has sued Lorenz and the Times for defamation.)

Again, there is a clear pattern : the attack is not motivated by righteous indignation but a need to shield oneself from the woke mob—and the corporate cancel machine at its behest. More than that, it’s a leg up in the woke landscape, a new weapon in what Bari Weiss aptly dubbed the “digital thunderdome.” Elite media darling Stewart goes after an independent gay liberal. Blue-blooded Lorenz takes down a Mexican-American immigrant. The game is frighteningly zero-sum.

This is the new knee-capping of America’s new media. What’s different about it is that where the political hit piece has always been a tactic in the press’ editorial armory, the knee-cap is now the whole point. Take out the enemy, get the trophy. A 600-word racing horse head in the bed; a midnight visit from woke Luca Brasi.

What the knee-cap media doesn’t seem to get is that the rest of us aren’t with them. Sure, their Twitter base goes wild when some auto-da-fe hobbles home. But real life Americans—not those who made $30 million a year telling jokes or who glided down from the Swiss Alps to softly land in the New York Times newsroom—are paying attention. And they don’t like what they see.