Jon Stewart offers a bottle of truth to the corporate mass media.

Listening to the Majority Report this evening, I was alerted to Jon Stewart's appearance on CNN's Crossfire earlier today, which turned out to be anything but a casual stop on his current book tour. The host of the emmy-winning Daily Show got awfully confrontational with Crossfire hosts Paul Begala & Tucker Carlson, referring to them as "partisan hacks" and calling them to task for neglecting their duties as journalists. Stewart & Carlson got pretty testy with each other, with Stewart poking fun at Carlson's bow-tie & calling Carlson a "dick" before going to commercial break.

No, I didn't see it, though I wish I had. I try not to watch cable news whenever possible. You can read the transcript for yourself online, and/or check out what Alternet or MTV.com have reported thus far. Wonkette has not one, not two, but three entries on the subject, & Atrios has two.

Apparently, Carlson & Begala don't understand what The Daily Show is all about. The Daily Show's "fake news" may take shots at politicians, but it's actually satirizing the news media. So when TPTB (the powers that be) over at CNN invited Stewart onto their "debate" program, they shouldn't have been entirely suprised that he, as a successful comedian & social critic, would actually choose to discuss his area of general "expertise" with the hosts. It wasn't Comedy Central's The Daily Show, this was CNN's Crossfire, which "examines the political and social issues impacting the United States" according to their website. Begala & Carlson thought their guest would just be a comedian plugging a book, but they forgot whose show was whose.

Jon Stewart probably didn't make many friends on Crossfire today, and we might not see him on CNN again, but he certainly showed some guts by standing up for something & calling the media out on their sh**. I guess a few emmys and a Peabody allows you to get away with being this honest.

If regular host & "douchebag of justice" Bob Novak (in the hospital with a busted hip) had been on the show, might Stewart have decked him?

ETA: Suprnova has a torrent to download the video (AVI 97mb click here).

This entry was posted by mr gilbert at 10/15/2004 06:45:00 PM.