I really like Jon Stewart, because he doesn’t take himself seriously, and he doesn’t mind pointing out where the emperor has no clothes. Take this interview on CNN, where he discussed, among other things, the media coverage of the DC sniper.
STEWART: I thought it was the media’s finest hour, the sniper coverage.
KURTZ: Finest hour?
STEWART: Absolutely, by watching the 24-hour news networks, I learned that the sniper was an olive-skinned, white-black male — men — with ties to Son of Sam, al Qaeda, and was a military kid, playing video games, white, 17, maybe 40.
KURTZ: They really nailed it, didn’t they?
STEWART: I thought they did great. And I thought it was really responsible to put them on. I thought CNN, MSNBC, FOX, did a great job putting on — you know what they should’ve called the coverage, “You know what I heard?” and just have people randomly showing…
(LAUGHTER)
KURTZ: What should happen to all of these experts who came and filled the airwaves with all of these predictions that turned out to be completely and totally wrong?
STEWART: Well, it’s not their fault.
KURTZ: It’s not their fault?
STEWART: No.
KURTZ: Shouldn’t they have to resign from the talking head society?
STEWART: Shouldn’t CNN have to pay a penalty for putting them on the air? You’re Paulie Walnuts. You’re vouching. You brought a guy in, and you put him on the air and you vouched. You said, “No, Tony, this guy, he’s good people, he’s credible.” So whatever they say, I mean, they’re called profilers.
… I don’t understand the idea of — you know I heard a guy talking — actually on your show — saying, “Well, the public really wanted information. They had a real thirst for information. So because we didn’t really have that much information, we had to just speculate.”
KURTZ: We made it up.
STEWART: Right. Which seems insane. That’s like saying, “You know, the kids were real thirsty, and we didn’t have any water, so we just gave them beer, because we figured that would work.”
Good stuff.
(via Blather)
I was watching when that guy spouted out the “speculation” line. I just started laughing. I didn’t know how to take that kind of blatant honesty from the media.
It was basically, “We have nothing new to report to the sheep, so we are just going to make stuff up.”
It was classic.
Jon Stewart rules. He’s one of the few reasons I regret not having cable tv. (No Comedy Channel so I can watch the Daily Show.)
I saw a print interview/profile of Stewart not long ago, in either the New Yorker or the Sunday NY Times. He said the most unnerving part of his show is that he knows for a fairly good-sized hunk of his audience he *is* their source for the news.
I thought at first that this was a fairly egotistical statement and then I started informally asking my daughter’s friends and her contemporaries (the kids of my friends) and it turns out many of them resolutely ignore traditional news sources, but they enjoy Stewart.
Yowza. I realize it’s a small informal poll of a dozen or so university educated 20 somethings, but still it surprised me no end.
I’ve heard that stat, and I can believe it. Stewart’s a lot more entertaining (and comes across as a lot more sincere) than most of the network talking heads.
Actually, that was Dave the Husband, on Margie the Wife’s machine.