Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart hears of Britain’s tabloid disgrace

Returning from vacation, Stewart feels better about America when he learns of the News of the World scandal

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Jon Stewart hears of Britain's tabloid disgraceJohn Oliver regails the News of the World scandal to Stewart

“The Daily Show”‘s British correspondent, John Oliver, makes Jon Stewart feel a little better about ethics standards in the American press with a biting summary of the News of the World’s most egregious behavior, which led to media mogul Rupert Murdoch shutting down the title last week.

“Do you know how hard it is to disgrace a British tabloid?” Oliver asked Stewart, before detailing the wrongdoings of the newspaper.

“You people are garbage!” exclaims Stewart in response to hearing the story in its gritty entirety.

Watch the clip below:

Natasha Lennard covers the Occupy movement for Salon. A British-born, Brooklyn-based journalist, she has been covering Occupy Wall Street since before the first sleeping bag was unrolled in Zuccotti Park. One of the first journalists arrested at an Occupy action, she has managed to enrage Andrew Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. You can follow her on Twitter (@natashalennard), and email her any Occupy updates/videos/ideas to natasha.lennard@gmail.com

Stewart questions N.Y.’s legislative priorities

Comedian wonders: Why are senators voting on the state's official vegetable when they could address gay marriage?

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Stewart questions N.Y.'s legislative priorities

The New York state Senate still hasn’t brought Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Marriage Equality Act to a vote, despite days of extra meetings (the bill needs only one more vote to pass). Last night on “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart took a look at some of the other issues legislators have been addressing in their extended session — and made it clear he doesn’t think a vote on New York’s state vegetable is quite as pressing as a decision on gay marriage.

Emma Mustich is a Salon contributor. Follow her on Twitter: @emustich.

Herman Cain deploys dreaded “race card”

Does Jon Stewart make fun of the pizza mogul candidate because ... he's black?

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Herman Cain deploys dreaded

Herman Cain, pizza magnate, Tea Partyer, and black Republican presidential candidate, wants you to know that he was just “exaggerating” when he said he’d veto all bills longer than three pages and guard the border with alligators. But Jon Stewart made fun of him for saying those things, and so Jon Stewart is racist. Yep: Herman Cain’s “playing the race card!” So soon after he promised to take it off the table.

Here’s a long ThinkProgress video of Cain addressing the Iowa Falls Fire Department(!):

Cain said Stewart “mocked me with a, you know, Amos and Andy type brogue.” (Stewart did a not-great impression of Cain’s public speaking voice, akin to his not-great Bush and McCain impressions.) And Cain went on to compare Stewart to people who’ve used racial epithets against Cain and said Stewart (and presumably others mocking Cain’s statement) were motivated to do so by his race:

Sticks and stone may break my bones, words are not going to hurt me. I was on that radio show because a happen to be an American black conservative. I labeled my self. I’m an American Black Conservative, an A-B-C. They keep trying to put labels on me. I have been called “Uncle Tom,” “sell out,” “Oreo,” “shameless.” So the fact that [Stewart] wants to mock me because I happen to be a black conservative, in the words of my Grandfather, “I does not care. I does not care.”

Herman Cain has no doubt been called horrible things by supposed liberals. But the biggest reason why he is ridiculed by people like Jon Stewart is that he is ridiculous. Even if it’s not literal, the “no long bills” thing is stupid!

Of course, Herman Cain has also explicitly promised that his candidacy would “take race off the table.” Conservatives believe that liberals regularly deploy phony accusations of racism as a political tactic (a horrible political tactic, because it’s clearly driven white men to the GOP, but whatever). They’ve taken to acting as if accusations of racism (or, more accurately, the highlighting of right-wing appeals to race-based anxieties and resentments) are slanderous and always uncalled for. So why is Herman Cain now acting exactly like Obama, and accusing all of his critics of racism? For shame, Herman Cain. How else are you exactly like Obama? How many czars will you appoint??

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

Puppet John McCain returns to “The Daily Show”

Jon Stewart grills the senator's cloth doppelganger about illegal immigrants' responsibility for wildfires

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Puppet John McCain returns to

Sen. John McCain made some controversial claims over the weekend about illegal immigrants’ responsibility for border-region wildfires. “[W]e are concerned particularly about areas down on the border where there is substantial evidence that some of these fires are caused by people who have crossed our border illegally,” McCain said at a news conference, suggesting that “the answer to that part of the problem” was to “get a secure border.” (The senator has since denied that he was referring specifically to Arizona’s devastating Wallow fire with his remarks.)

As Salon’s Justin Elliott has pointed out, McCain’s “substantial evidence” has been hard to confirm — and last night, Jon Stewart tried to clear things up by interviewing the politician’s cranky puppet counterpart.

See the full clip here:

The Daily Show – Aliens vs. Senator
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Stewart’s McCain puppet debuted in January with this appearance:

 

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Emma Mustich is a Salon contributor. Follow her on Twitter: @emustich.

Stewart slams Fox as “lying dynasty”

Comedian admits he made a "mistake" during his Chris Wallace interview -- then points out some of Fox's recent lies

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Stewart slams Fox as

During a provocative interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday, Jon Stewart claimed repeatedly that Fox has “the most consistently misinformed media viewers.”

“As it turns out, I was misinformed,” Stewart admitted to his own viewers last night on “The Daily Show,” addressing a PolitiFact report that had used polling data to rate his claim “false.”

“Ultimately, PolitiFact declared my statement false,” Stewart said. “I defer to their judgment, and I apologize for my mistake; to not do so would be irresponsible.” He added: “If I were to continue to make such mistakes and misstatements and not correct them — especially if each and every one of those misstatements happened to go in one very particular direction on the political spectrum — well, that would undermine the very integrity and credibility that I work so hard to pretend to care about.”

This was Stewart’s cue to embark on a tour of PolitiFact’s coverage of Fox News itself over the past several years, and the comedian went on to point out more apparent Fox errors than seemed to fit comfortably onto one television screen. (Some of the Fox misstatements he highlighted were “Health care bill includes death panels” and “Health care reform is a government takeover of health care” — Politifact’s “Lies of the Year” for 2009 and 2010, respectively.)

Stewart’s conclusion: “[Fox News is] like the New England Patriots of lying — without the ‘patriots’ part, because I think we all know patriots cannot tell a lie.”

Watch the clip here:

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Emma Mustich is a Salon contributor. Follow her on Twitter: @emustich.

No, Jon Stewart, you’re not just a comedian

When he's not actually doing it on his show, the "Daily Show" host's media criticism can come across as trite

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No, Jon Stewart, you're not just a comedianJon Stewart

This originally appeared at Attytood, Will Bunch’s blog at Philly.com

TV funnyman (I love that phrase) Jon Stewart is back in the news again, as he so frequently seems to be. For reasons I don’t fully understand, Chris Wallace thought it would be a good idea to invite the host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” on his program, “Fox News Sunday,” and Stewart agreed to come on. Of course, Stewart showed his gratitude by telling Wallace that he was “insane” and saying that FNC is disproportionately responsible for poisoning the discourse in this country.

Stewart called Fox News a “relentless agenda-driven 24-hour news opinion propaganda delivery system” — that sounds about right. But then he added this:

“Here’s the difference between you and I. I’m a comedian first. My comedy is informed by an ideological background, there’s no question about that. But the thing that you will never understand … is that Hollywood, yeah, they’re liberal, but that’s not their primary motivating force. I’m not an activist. I am a comedian.”

Longtime readers know I have a tangled view of Jon Stewart and his role in our vast and all-powerful media universe. Like a lot of folks who love both politics and the absurdity of politics, I live for the arrival of Stewart and “TDS” at 11 p.m., and I get anxious and uneasy during those way too many weeks the show is on vacation, as it was last week. That’s because I think when he’s doing his “day job” during those 30 minutes he is — bizarre as it sounds — the best working journalist in America. The examples are many — his legendary takedown of CNBC that shone light on the financial crisis in a way that mainstream media wasn’t capable of doing, his relentless fact-checking of the TV news, and — most nobly of all — his fight for the 9/11 rescue workers when it became clear that our politicians and journalists were too craven to do anything.

But outside of “The Daily Show,” in interviews like the one he gave to Chris Wallace and even his famous 2004 confrontation that may or may not have killed CNN’s “Crossfire,” I find that Stewart (and it pains me to say this, as such a fan) can come across as kind of lame, his “media criticism” beyond trite. In interviews, his complaints against the media tend to be an unsophisticated “pox on all of your houses.” I thought his largely pointless D.C. mall rally in late October repeated the mistake he makes in these interviews — trying to argue that our discourse is too loud while ignoring the real point that he hammers home on “The Daily Show,” that our politics is irrational.

But the lamest thing of all, frankly, is Stewart trying to absolve responsibility from the gravitas of what he does — and make no mistake, the gravitas is there — by claiming that merely, “I am a comedian.” That’s true, but he fails to see what many others realize, which is that he is also much more than a comedian. In a world where far too much of highly paid professional journalism, especially inside the Beltway, has become a joke, it has fallen on the comedians — Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher perhaps the most prominent — to say what on-one-hand, on-the-other hand journalists are too tied up in knots to tell you, that much of America’s discourse in 2011 is bat-guano insane.

Actually, Jon Stewart, you are an activist, and the cause you fight for is most worthy because — as you do correctly note — it is not a purely ideological one, but the cause of reason. And the fight against illogic is not a “fair and balanced” one, that the most dangerous bogus ideas may be concentrated in the spots where global warming doesn’t exist and the way to balance a budget deficit is more tax cuts for rich people. For whatever reason, in the past your friend and colleague Colbert — who coined “truthiness” and said that reality has a known liberal bias — has gotten it a lot better than you do.

Maybe Stewart is starting to get it, too. He did say on Sunday that he has an ideology that “is non-partisan and focuses on ‘absurdity,’ ‘anti-corruption’ and ‘anti lack-of-authenticity.’” That sounds exactly right, so now it’s time to drop the “just a comedian” shtick, which comes off like a giant cop-out, exactly the kind of thing that you normally expose so very well, night after night.

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

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Will Bunch is a senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and author of the political blog Attytood.

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