Remember when Jon Stewart went on “Crossfire” seven years ago or so and utterly dismantled its entire reason for being, and Tucker Carlson said Stewart should start a journalism school? (And Stewart responded, “You should go to one.”) Stewart’s appearance on Fox Sunday Morning and interview with Chris Wallace may not have had as many fireworks, but it was better in many respects, in part because Wallace let Stewart have his say. (At least online. The interview was heavily edited before it aired on TV.)
Part 2
It’s a revealing interview, and required viewing for anyone who likes to understand where her news comes from. Whether you’re a “Daily Show” disciple or a Fox News devotee, this is a great discussion about some of the decisions that go into getting stories on the air.
Stewart and Fox viewers are on the same side in some ways, because both are disaffected with what they see when they turn on the news. And that news doesn’t have a liberal bias. It has, as Stewart says, a lazy, sensational bias. (Chuck Klosterman had a great essay about this in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.)
Case in point: the Nancy Pelosi press conference that all the 24-hour networks cut away from as soon as she announced that she wasn’t going to discuss Anthony Weiner (which he also talked about on his show Monday night). We can all agree that this is ridiculous and worthy of parody.
(But we’re the same people who turned up our noses when Jon Meacham tried to turn Newsweek into a more long-form analysis publication, so what do we know?)
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