The Comic vs. the Bully

Or “The Fake Journalist vs. the Non-Journalist”. Into the lion’s den: watch as The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, who for a “fake journalist” is arguably one of the most accurate voices in today’s media, gets interviewed by the first of Faux News’ Three Musketeers, Bill O’Reilly. Even through Bill-O’s usual cheap editing tricks, you can still tell how vividly Stewart dominated this battle of wits and words.

It’s a good interview (in the sense that it’s entertaining, not that it was particularly journalistically sound), and Stewart generally carried himself quite well. I do wish he wouldn’t have laid down and taken the defeat when O’Reilly “called him out” for reprimanding Fox for bailing out of the President’s exchange with (read: “evisceration of”) the GOP of late, though. Fox’s act of cutting the feed when they were so obviously and deliciously having their ideological ass handed to them by the President they spend so much time decrying and vilifying was transparently partisan and biased. For Stewart to concede defeat under O’Reilly’s accusation that Stewart, himself, failed to mention how CNN and NBC didn’t cover Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts when Fox did cover Brown’s speech, is a shame, as Bill-O’s argument is a curious mixture of a non sequitur and simple irrelevance.

For one thing, though, I do know I’d raise quite a bit more fuss than Stewart did if Bill-O called my audience a bunch of “stoned slackers who love Obama”. Or is Stewart’s Defame-o-Meter not working properly?

(via @todayspolitics)