Comments on: Report from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

By: TVS October-in-Review: Big stories that held my interest this month « TV Surveillance

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:06:30 +0000

[…] The folks who made the trek to Washington D.C. seemed to be overwhelmed by the event, discussing it with a reverence that honestly sounded a bit hyperbolic, but who am I to really judge one’s personal experience of an event I was a 800 miles away from? For that viewpoint, check out a great post by Christine Becker over at Antenna. […]

By: Christine Becker

Christine Becker — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 14:33:09 +0000

That’s a really great question. My sense is that most in the crowd bought into Stewart’s pre-rally rhetoric that this wasn’t a political or partisan event, instead it was an extension of the TV show. So most of the signs that people brought, for instance, were meta-signs (a favorite: “If your belief fits on a sign, think harder”) rather than political ones, and most of the political ones were going for satire, dominated by Christine O’Donnell witch and masturbation jokes, rather than sincere and pointed political statements. It was like everyone was play-acting The Daily Show in rally form (another very intriguing angle on the live/TV relationship). And it also seemed like anytime someone on the stage tried to veer into political poignancy, like John Legend with his Vietnam-era cover, the audience grew restless (that’s when people sat down or turned to talk to each other). The exception was Stewart’s final speech, which everyone seemed riveted by. So, though I’ll qualify that my perspective is likely affected by the section I was in, where I was surrounded mainly by family groups and not young hipsters, I didn’t sense that the audience wanted the event to be more politically-minded than it was. I do wonder if many in retrospect will wish it was, especially because of the huge potential for a groundswell of committed feeling in such a large crowd. But in the moment, for better or for worse in regard to what it says about us and Jon Stewart, I sensed that the audience just wanted to have a good time and not necessarily be outwardly politicized.

By: Nick Marx

Nick Marx — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 13:28:17 +0000

Thanks for the insights, Chris. Any sense among the crowd of the expectation for Stewart/Colbert to address politics more directly? For the most part, their target throughout the event (as it’s been for much of the Obama administration) was THE MEDIA. Seems like this plays better on television than it did during the rally (which I was, uh, watching on television).