Jay Leno’s Phony Case for Balanced Comedy

Why is it that every time a great late night host loses a job, Jay Leno appears? Back in the 1990s, when David Letterman lost out on hosting The Tonight Show, Leno was there to claim victory. When Conan O’Brien briefly replaced Leno and then got fired from The Tonight Show, Leno was there to take his old job back. This month, CBS fired arch–Trump critic Stephen Colbert and canceled The Late Show—perfect timing to signal to the Trump administration that CBS’s new owner, David Ellison’s Skydance, would offer more “viewpoint diversity” (i.e., Trump-friendly material) on its airwaves. And out of a clear blue sky, Leno is back!

Viewers who suffered through those earlier late-night wars can rest easy in this respect: CBS isn’t hiring Leno as Colbert’s replacement. Instead, Leno has resurfaced in an interview with David Trulio of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute to complain about how politically one-sided late night comedy has become. “I love political humor, don’t get me wrong,” Leno told Trulio. “But it’s just what happens when people wind up cozying too much to one side or the other…. Why shoot for just half an audience all the time? You know, why not try to get the whole. I mean, I like to bring people into the big picture.”

Sure, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Colbert go after Trump relentlessly—he is the sitting president, after all, and one whose extremist bigotry, penchant for attacking comedians, and criminal record puts him in a special class of sitting president. It’s hard to see what else they would do.

Without acknowledging any of that, Leno and Trulio discuss the need for a “both sides” approach to late night as if it were an extension of network news—as if comedians need to give an objective accounting of the day’s events. These people host late-night comedy shows, not presidential debates. We currently have a Republican White House, Congress, Senate, and Supreme Court. It’s not as if having two parties means both sides hold equal power. If Leno wants to see more jokes about Democrats, he should help elect more Democrats.

It’s also a bit much to hear the CEO of a foundation named after Ronald Reagan laud Jay Leno for his evenhandedness in political humor. It was the Reagan administration that did away with the Federal Communication Committee’s Fairness Doctrine in 1987. That long-standing policy obligated broadcast television and radio owners regulated by the FCC—including ABC, CBS, and NBC—to devote time to opposing and varying views as a way to keep media corporations from monopolizing political discourse. Republicans argued that getting rid of the doctrine expanded free speech—in a dramatically unregulated media industry, they maintained, the free market would dictate what views and politics actually get presented.

And it did. Once the doctrine disappeared, a media revolution ensued. With broadcasters no longer fettered by fairness standards or fact-checked rebuttals, the career of Rush Limbaugh became possible. Allowed to bloviate uninterrupted for three hours a day on talk radio, Limbaugh found a huge national following for his grievance-based agenda, and paved the way for any number of highly successful imitators to follow suit. Talk radio remains a conservative stronghold where few liberals succeed.

And yet, despite no longer having a Fairness Doctrine to hold them back, that kind of right-wing grievance culture has never taken hold at the three legacy networks, especially at 11:30 pm and 12:30 am, where the comedy tilts left and anti-Trump—much to the consternation of Jay Leno and the FCC.

The Trump administration, in its approval of the Skydance-led deal for Paramount and CBS, has now insisted that CBS hire an ombudsman to ensure that the network offers MAGA-friendly political and social views in its news broadcasts. If Trump sought anything resembling actual “viewpoint diversity,” he could simply bring back the Fairness Doctrine to balance content across the airwaves—although that would destroy conservative talk radio. Imposing an ombudsman on CBS ensures that conservative views will air where they do not succeed—i.e., broadcast news done outside the MAGA media bubble.

Needless to say, virtually none of this has occurred to Jay Leno. “As the host of The Tonight Show,” Leno said a few years ago, “I liked to humiliate and degrade both sides equally.” Really? Jay Leno—“fair and balanced” comedian? A 2009 George Mason University study found that of the 33,000 jokes Leno told about politicians during his first run as The Tonight Show’s host, he told 4,468 Bill Clinton jokes and 2,999 about George W. Bush. (Spare a moment of studio-audience silence for whatever poor undergrad research assistant was forced to sit through those 7,467 jokes.) Of course, there’s no reason Leno shouldn’t have gone after Clinton more than Bush if he wanted to—just as there’s no reason why Kimmel, Colbert, or Fallon shouldn’t go after Trump more than anyone else. Nor is a spreadsheet analysis of 33,000 jokes really necessary to figure out that Leno has always been a center-right comedian. As he himself has said, “People can kind of figure out your politics if they’re paying attention.”

Leno’s right-leaning show regularly topped Letterman’s in the ratings. The liberal slant of current late-night has a lot to do with the deeply unpopular policies of President Trump and the viewing demographic that’s stayed with late-night programing on network television. It’s not as if comedy itself is getting more liberal or leftist. The podcaster-comedians who helped Trump get elected tilt rightward, and the current success of Greg Gutfeld and continued success of Bill Maher don’t remotely suggest that conservative views can’t catch a break in the comedy world.