Watching The Daily Show in Kenya

Abstract

Global distribution of a popular American television programme – Jon Stewart's Daily Show – offers a rare opportunity to examine transnational contingencies of meaning in political satire. Drawing on focus group discussions in Kenya, this analysis shows how some East Africans appropriated and reinterpreted – indeed unexpectedly subverted – The Daily Show's political content, deriving from it insights that Stewart himself might have found surprising. Kenyan viewers perceived in The Daily Show gaps between the rhetoric and reality of empire and pointed to limitations of Stewart's dissident satire as they rejected its depictions of non-wealthy nations and marginalized peoples. They reconfigured Daily Show episodes as commentaries on global power relations; reflected critically on Kenyan politics, media and their own political subjectivities; and revised their own earlier assumptions about the gap between Africa and supposedly ‘mature’ democracies such as the United States. Thus, American political satire such as The Daily Show can activate in foreign audiences new perceptions of differences between the ‘West’ and the rest and new forms of political imagination.

Keywords:

• political satire
• news media
• globalization
• Jon Stewart
• Kenya
• democracy

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Lesley Gill, Daniel Goldstein, Dorothy Hodgson, Fran Mascia Lees, Emily McDonald, Noelle Molé, Louisa Schein and Debra Spitulnik for helpful comments on an earlier draft. A note on the co-authors' division of labour: Haugerud initiated the project and prepared early drafts of the manuscript, to which all three authors contributed. Ference and Mahoney recruited focus group participants in Mombasa, conducted and videotaped the interviews and transcribed them. Mahoney selected Daily Show episodes for focus group interviews. All three authors have extensive research experience in Kenya. At the time of the interviews, Ference and Mahoney were wrapping up their own research projects in Kenya on other topics; Ference was funded primarily by Fulbright IIE and Mahoney by Fulbright Hays. Research funds from Rutgers University helped support this project.

Notes

1. Brian Williams (NBC), Charlie Gibson (ABC) and Katie Couric (CBS). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/22/time-magazine-poll-jon-st_n_242933.html [Accessed 7 March 2012]. Stewart also polled well in a 2007 Pew Research Center survey (Kakutani 2008).

2. See http://www.thedailyshow.com for video clips and background information. The Daily Show, hosted by Stewart since January 1999, is taped in Manhattan and broadcast nationally Monday through Thursday evenings.

3. See Baym (2005), Bennett (2007), Boler and Turpin (2008), Borden and Tew (2007), Brewer and Marquardt (2007), Feldman (2007), Love (2007), McKain (2005), Ross and York (2007) and Smolkin (2007), among others.

4. This shift was propelled by British cultural studies. See Askew and Wilk (2002), Dickey (1997), Ginsburg et al. (2002), Hall (1980), Mankekar and Schein (2004) and Spitulnik (1993). See also Postill (2009) and Peterson's (2009) exchange about anthropology's contribution to interdisciplinary media studies.

5. See, for example, the fine collection on satirical television co-edited by Gray et al. (2009). Most of the contributors are scholars in media studies, English, cultural studies, communication and theatre arts. Such works often are based on secondary sources, national survey data or armchair analysis rather than extended discussions with ordinary citizens. Important anthropological precursor studies of how foreign audiences respond to US televisual material include Kulick and Willson (2002[1994]), Liebes and Katz (1990) and Miller (1992).

6. On democracy, see Dunn (2005) and Tilly (2007).

7. For example, see Jeffrey Gettleman's New York Times coverage (http://www.nytimes.com).

8. It is not our intention to invoke an earlier ‘linear communication model’ or to assume that ‘language operates in a strictly referential function as a transparent means of conveying content’. The phrases just quoted are from Spitulnik (1993, p. 297), who urges attention to the ‘indeterminacy of media texts’ (which is precisely our aim).

9. The latter two phrases are from Baym's (2005, pp. 261, 263) US-focused analysis of The Daily Show.

10. For a US Justice Department example, see Smith (2009).

11. All names of Kenyan interviewees are pseudonyms.

12. Brewer and Marquardt (2007, pp. 260–261) found that nearly half of 222 Daily Show news stories between 4 January and 19 April 2005 ‘covered world affairs in some way’. Topics included the war in Iraq, possible invasion of Iran, Syria, Palestinian elections, poverty in Africa, Kyoto Treaty, selection of a new World Bank president and the tsunami in Asia.

13. See McLeod and Hertog (1999) and Gitlin (2003) on US media representations of protest.

14. On empire, see Hardt and Negri (2000) and Harvey (2003).

15. The importance of an independent press as a check on abuses of political power dates back at least to the late nineteenth-century classical liberal thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (see Thompson 1995, c. 8). By the late twentieth century, Thompson (1995, p. 239) notes, the principal threat posed to a free and critical press was not the state (as in the late-nineteenth century) but concentration of media resources in a handful of huge corporations whose commercial growth was subject to little state regulation.

16. Baym (2005, p. 266).

17. On the limitations of dominant news reporting styles in the United States, see Bagdikian (2004), Fallows (1997), Feldman (2007), Jamieson and Waldman (2003), McChesney (1999) and Moyers (2008).

18. On other such spaces, see Boler's (2008) analysis of ‘citizen journalism’ and alternative media, and how multiplication of non-mainstream digital media sources shapes political and social movements.

19. See various 2006 articles on this topic in Africa Confidential (http://www.africa-confidential.com [Accessed 14 January 2010]).

20. Personal communication, April 2008. See Gado (2000).

21. See http://www.xyzshow.com

22. See http://www.transparency.org [Accessed 18 July 2009].

23. See Barkan (2008), Wrong (2009) and multiple articles in Africa Confidential (http:www.africa-confidential.com)

24. On the post-election violence, see Barkan (2008) and scholarly commentaries in the London online publication OpenDemocracy: <http:www.opendemocracy.com> [Accessed 7 January 2009].

25. See also Bernard (2006, pp. 232–239) on focus groups.

26. The women met on Wednesday, 14 June 2006 and the men the following evening.

27. On contingencies of coastal Kenyan identities, see McIntosh (2009), Bravman (1998) and Caplan and Topan (2004).

28. The Daily Show, transmitted globally by CNN International, in 2006 was broadcast in Kenya on KTN, a popular station that is part of the Standard Media Group, which publishes Kenya's second most widely circulated daily newspaper. KTN usually transmits CNN International between midnight and 6:00 am and between 9:30 am and 1:00 pm. To access CNN International directly in Kenya requires satellite/dish service (DSTV), which costs about 50 dollars per month and is unaffordable for many Kenyans.

29. On Sheng, see Mazrui (1995); on code switching between Swahili and English, see Myers-Scotton (1993).

30. Furthermore, since Jon Stewart's humour relies on a ‘dense web of allusion’ or intertextuality (see Bakhtin 1981), comprehending its comic aspects requires familiarity with the variety of voices, speech genres and idiolects he recycles and modifies.

31. See Baym 2005, pp. 262–272) for a description of Daily Show segments and style.

32. 14 December 2005 Daily Show episode.

33. See also Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (2009).

34. That statement later became historically ironic, as a minority of ultra-conservatives in the United States tried to stir controversy by claiming that Obama had been born in Kenya rather than Hawaii.

35. 7 November 2005 episode of The Daily Show.

36. 7 November 2005 episode of The Daily Show. For scholarly analyses of the late 2005 protests in France, see http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/ [Accessed 5 January 2010].

37. See, for example, Pedelty's (1995) study of how American journalists report news in foreign conflict zones.

38. http://www.marsgroupkenya.org/new/ [Accessed 16 July 2009]. By 2011, Gado's XYZ Show had become a hit and had a strong Facebook presence and a very popular YouTube channel. Yet, Gado says his show ‘only manages to escape censorship because Gado owns his own production company, which is financed by private donors’ (Singer 2011).