A close friend of mine recently confessed to having stopped watching cable news altogether because it was causing him and his wife anxiety and dread. They began watching Jimmy Kimmel instead, saying the nightly news felt like "psychological warfare" on their mental state. "We want to know what's going on but can't handle the relentless doom and gloom every night," he told me.
Jimmy Kimmel, host of ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live, seems to understand this shift. "A year ago, I would've said I'm hoping to show people who aren't paying attention to the news what's actually going on," he told Rolling Stone last month in an interview. "Now I see myself more as a place to scream."
This isn't surprising. For almost a decade now, the relationship between audiences and late-night hosts has changed profoundly. Viewers are tuning out cable news and seeking clarity, humor, and relief from late-night comedians like Stephen Colbert and Greg Gutfeld and the cold opens on SNL. On Bluesky, the buzzy new social platform for those fleeing Elon Musk's X, one user wrote, "It's ironic that I use satire shows as more reliable sources than the US mainstream media." For better or worse, this phenomenon has become a new form of journalism.
How We Got Here
We didn't always turn to comedians for the headlines. For decades, late-night hosts Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, and even David Letterman at his most biting, still centered on celebrity interviews and innocuous zingers. The turning point came after 9/11 when Jon Stewart's emotional monologue on The Daily Show demonstrated that comedy could process national grief.
Following Trump's election in 2016, traditional news became more combative and chaotic. The nightly barrage of outrage left viewers emotionally exhausted. Therapists coined it: "Trump Anxiety Disorder." A recent Axios report found that the chaos surrounding Trump and the 2020 election contributed to a 10% rise in major health issues, including cancer and heart attacks.
In this increasingly tense political climate, liberal audiences found validation through shows like HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Real Time with Bill Maher, and NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers'segment "A Closer Look". These programs offer viewers not just a recap of the news but a way to process it, laugh through it, and bear it. They tackle the most important stories of the day from the tariff wars, the Kilmar Abrego Garcia deportation case, and a potential Trump third term, all blurring the lines of comedy and journalism.
The Numbers Tell the Story
The popularity of this approach is evident in the ratings. Shows from Colbert, Kimmel, and Gutfeld often outperform traditional cable news in their respective timeframes. For instance, on April 17, Gutfeld! captured 3,177,000 viewers at 10 p.m., significantly outperforming CNN's Abby Phillip (527,000 viewers) and MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell (1,643,000 viewers) in the same slot. This performance has established Gutfeld as the dominant voice in late-night ratings.
For conservative viewers, long feeling alienated by mainstream comedy, the rise of Greg Gutfeld—the former Fox News host turned late-night comedian—and his late-night show Gutfeld! wasn't about offering traditional late-night laughs, it was about providing conservative viewers a late-night space where their frustrations were acknowledged with humor, not shame. His success highlights how late-night comedy has evolved into ideological echo chambers that reinforce our worldviews, signaling a profound shift in how we consume political information today.
The Trade-Off
Yet, while comedians offer us a news style that relieves the stress of traditional reporting, it's important to remember they are not journalists. John Oliver, host of HBO's Last Week Tonight, describes his broadcast bluntly: "It's not journalism. It's comedy first, comedy second." It's true that their job is to entertain first, but it's also clear they do a kind of journalism that engages and connects with us in ways traditional news no longer can. The balance we strike is revealing: we choose comfort over journalistic credibility.
Conclusion: Emotional Survival Over News Accuracy
Mainstream news has stopped working for many Americans. That's why late-night comedy, for all its irreverence and partisan leanings, is doing what we once expected journalism to do: tell the truth, make it understandable, and offer us a sense of understanding and comfort.
Meanwhile, with news channels pushing viewers into opposing camps, comedians have become one of the few places where people still gather, night after night, for some much-needed catharsis. But whether you agree with their politics or not, they have become the voices Americans turn to when the world stops making sense. They remind us that we're not crazy, and in a country where the truth can sound like a joke, the last laugh belongs to those who can still help us make sense of it all.
Jack Rico is an entertainment journalist, TV host, and media pundit with over two decades of experience covering Latinos in media and entertainment. He was recently featured on ABC News' primetime special Latinos in Hollywood and is the co-host of the Webby-nominated podcast Brown & Black.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.