Sunday, January 30, 2011

‘Selective Editing’: Jon Stewart Unfairly Rips Bill O’Reilly and a Complicit Left-Wing Media Helps Him - Big Journalism

‘Selective Editing’: Jon Stewart Unfairly Rips Bill O’Reilly and a Complicit Left-Wing Media Helps Him - Big Journalism
I respectfully disagree with O’Reilly that Stewart should be held to a lower factual standard because he’s a “satirist.” Stewart isn’t a satirist, he’s a political partisan disguised as a satirist, a man as determined to defeat the right as Nancy Pelosi and Bill Maher. The difference between Pelosi and Maher, though, is that they step into the arena of political battle and fly their flag. At the very least you can respect them for that. They come to wage open war whereas Stewart and Colbert come to throw rocks while wearing the protective shield of a clown nose.

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Another point O’Reilly made that should be highlighted, is how the so-called “objective” or “legitimate” media too often takes what Stewart and Colbert do as some kind of gospel. Because Stewart is a “comedian,” the liberal media uses that as an excuse to blow up what he does on their air or online without bothering to fact-check, even when the stakes involve reputations. We’ve seen this before. Nobody watches “Saturday Night Live” but everyone saw Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impression. With a smirk, and as though it didn’t matter, the left-wing media let Tina Fey do their dirty work on Palin with the endless looping of those SNL clips all in the name of “fun.” Well, it’s not fun, it’s an attempt to dehumanize someone into a national punchline and the media knew it.

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