I love Jon Stewart and I watch him just about every night, but I think sometimes we expect too much of him and not enough of our actual REAL news programming. Take for instance his interview with Marc Thiessen last night in my opinion was an EPIC FAIL in my opinion. Yes he made some decent points at times but for the overwhelming majority of the interview he was so uninformed on the subject that he couldn't refute any of the MANY MANY MANY lies coming out of Thiessen's mouth. I mean on basic points like with the information we got from Khalid Sheik Muhammed was total bullshit and most people following this issue know it. Yet Stewart just let him go on and on and on lying through his fucking teeth. And this bullshit is coming from a guy who was a frikkin SPEECHWRITER!!!
Maybe the most infuriating part of the interview was where Thiessen took shots at Ali Soufan. Not only did he accuse Soufan of torturing a detainee, which admittedly took a special kind of chutzpah, but he also labeled Soufan a "hero of the left".
No muthafucka, Soufan is a hero of this entire country. While Thiessen was sitting on his fat pasty ass in the White House in a nice climate controlled room writing speeches for Bush to butcher, Soufan was overseas putting his ass on the line, risking his life, and interrogating some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world all in the name of trying to keep ALL of us safe here at home. So on behalf of him, FUCK YOU and all the shit stains like you.
But again this isn't necessarily Jon Stewart's fault. He is after all a comedian and actor by trade, not a journalist. What we actually need is Wolf Blitzer to be asking hard questions of Thiessen and challenging him on all his points. Instead Thiessen is likely to get SOFTER questions should he happen to go on CNN. Oh and of course he has his own column in one of our nations biggest newspapers to spew this kind of blatantly false bullshit whenever he feels like it.
Such is the state of the media in our country, God help us all.
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In Stewart’s defense, I think the format of the interview doesn’t lend itself to what you’re asking for. The amount of time allotted to the interview doesn’t allow the host to rebut most of what the guest says. People like Thiessen and Liz Cheney use this to their advantage by packing so much bullshit into interviews that it’s humanly impossible to refute everything.
ReplyDeleteI agree wholly with your other point about people like Wolf Blitzer should be doing more tough interviews, though. I remember Stewart did a segment on this a while back where he highlighted that most guests saved their most controversial points for the end of the interview. The host would usually say “And we’re out of time so we’re going to have to leave it there”, which Stewart thought was idiotic for 24 HOUR! news network.