The New Blue Media

During this endless primary season we’ve heard more than one friend declare that he or she couldn’t wait to get home to see what Jon Stewart would say about the election results. It struck us (perhaps later than the rest of the country), that young liberals have become less dependent on the news and more reliant on the sharp-edged opinions of fake news programs, surely the result of a backlash against the conservative media that dominated the talking-head scene for so long. Enter Hamm, editor of the liberal Brooklyn Rail, whose greatest task in this new look at how progressive media has come to prominence is to provide historical context for a trend that has very little history.

Hamm is up to the task, however, tracking the growing popularity of opinion-mongers on the left, and then delineating the difference among Michael Moore (rabble-rouser masquerading as journalist), Stewart (comedian whose masquerades actually make him a journalist) and Stephen Colbert (comedian whose masquerades unmask masquerading journalists). Hamm digs deeper than the big three, however, looking at alternative media, documentary filmmaking and Air America.

If there’s one thing that holds Hamm, a professor of urban studies, back, it’s his heavily academic tone. What has made this new progressive media so successful is the shucking of the left’s typically academic robes in favor of a more populist approach. Hamm the stylist doesn’t quite match Hamm the thinker. But maybe that’s just the new, Comedy Central–addled liberal in us talking.