I was distressed to hear that The Nightly Show was cancelled. I think Larry Wilmore is smart and funny, the rest of the crew is talented each in their own way, and I found the show welcoming in that the cast was so diverse, and spoke frankly about racism. I had taken to watching it first, when I watch the news. Maybe it was a little rough, some of the jokes a little unpolished, but nothing that couldn’t have been tweaked. I was wondering how Larry would handle it, and it broke my heart when I watched him face the camera, after the audience went nuts in support, to comment. He said, “Well. How was YOUR day?” Everybody busted out laughing. A lot of people were mad about the n-word thing, which he didn’t mention on his show at the time, but explored last night in a hilarious bit with Mike Yard and Rory Albanese, in my favorite bit, Pardon the Integration. Monday’s episode was a good show, warm-hearted and sad. They always looked like they were having so much fun working together. I am really going to miss them.
So. We know that the right wing has a lot of media outlets; the noise machine, or echo chamber, is the wool that’s been pulled over the eyes of America, and it hasn’t just affected the people who watch it. When Fox News and the rest of their ilk demonize poor people, and black people, and women, it becomes the water we swim in. It affects everyone. The right wing has an entire “news” channel, as well as entire industries manufacturing American doubt in science, in facts, in the very idea of knowledge, churning out wingnut propaganda at a horrifying pace. And it has worked. Oh, it worked like gangbusters. Watch The Brainwashing of My Dad if you haven’t seen it. The right wing noise machine has taken us into a very dark place: Donald Trump, con man. The right wing noise machine is like a vaccination against truth, it never shuts up,and it just might destroy us.
All progressives really have in the way of broadcasting our message to the general population are a few websites, like this one, and a few political comedy shows. Very few political comedy shows. Comedy Central said Larry got cancelled because of ratings, you know, those Nielsen boxes? Right, I’ve never seen one either, because beginning in the late nineties a lot of people quit watching TV and started watching the Internet, instead. It’s like doing political polling on landlines. Younger people don’t have landlines, and they don’t watch cable TV. They don’t listen to NPR either. But they’ve been watching The Daily Show, The Nightly Show, The Colbert Report, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, and other kinds of liberal media online. From the commercials, it’s starting to look like Boomers are the only people watching TV, no offense.
Until yesterday, I had no idea that Larry Wilmore and Stephen Colbert were on TV at the same time. I haven’t watched TV since about 1997. Like millions of other people, I watch what I think of as “the news” in the morning: last night’s political comedy shows. I also read a lot online, but many younger people get all their news from political comedy, which they watch online, and they wind up better informed that any Fox viewer. The Nightly Show was the only show I know of looking at the USA from the minority perspective, and that always makes some white people nervous. There were certainly other (fixable) problems with the show, but being opposite Colbert kind of doomed Larry and friends to failure ratings-wise, didn’t it? Why pull the show right before the election? It’s insulting.
I think these shows and other web content are so important. They are basically the only outlet the left wing has to reach the young, the undecided and the sadly ignorant. Each one is precious, and I think we should support all of them, and raise a ruckus when we lose one. What The Nightly Show was trying to do is not easy but so important, to tackle head-on the racism that is so obviously prevalent throughout our culture: the racist water in which we swim. The toxic, deadly, dangerous water in which we swim, which was produced by the right wing. And now, extra poisonous with bonus Donald Trump! It has never been so important to amplify these voices in any way we can, just as enthusiastically as we flushed Rush. So when Larry gets a new show, which I’m sure he will, try and support him! Even if you like Stephen Colbert better. Black voices matter.