Month: June 2011

I'm late to this, but while Jon Stewart was killing it on Fox News this past weekend, his colleague Stephen Colbert did a wonderful job delivering a commencement address at Northwestern University; funny, pitch-perfect and surprisingly heartfelt and meaningful.  Worth watching.

 

 

Just saw this remarkable interview of Jon Stewart by Chris Wallace on Fox News.  In the interview, Wallace tries to make the case that Fox's conservative ideological bias is simply a counterweight for the liberal ideological bias of the rest of the news media.  Stewart forcefully and persuasively argues that there is a qualitative difference between the two, because while there may be some liberal bias in the people working in mainstream news, its main purpose is sensationalism, while Fox's main purpose is the pushing of a right wing political agenda.

 

 

http://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=1007046245001&w=466&h=263

 

As an example of the liberal bias of the mainstream news, Wallace shows a 4/23/10 clip of Diane Sawyer on World News Tonight.  She says in the clip, "If a stranger walking down the street or riding the bus does not seem to be a U.S. citizen, is it all right for the police to stop and question him?  Well, today the governor of Arizona signed a law that requires police to do just that."

 

Wallace then says to Stewart, "But that isn't what the law requires them to do.  In fact, the law says the only way that you can stop somebody, is as a part of a lawful enforcement stop. You can't just say, "Hey, you're walking down the street," exactly as she suggested.  It has to be because there's a broken taillight, or they're loitering, or they're doing something else. Don't you think she should have mentioned that?"

 

Stewart agrees, but says that's not an example of ABC News being politically biased, but rather being sensationalistic and lazy.

 

Actually, it's not even an example of sensationalism and laziness, and Sawyer shouldn't have mentioned that, because Wallace is wrong.  On the date of that broadcast, 4/23/10, the new law did say that police could detain an individual based merely on the suspicion of being an illegal immigrant.

 

Yes, the law really was that bad.

 

It wasn't until the law was AMENDED in response to threatened lawsuits, protests and boycotts that the law said that police could stop suspected illegal immigrants only while enforcing some other law or ordinance.  But this amendment didn't occur until 4/30/10, a week after the broadcast.

 

See, this is how these damn liberal activists in the mainstream media work!  Diane Sawyer accurately reported on the effect of a new law, which contributed to getting it modified, thus rendering her initial reporting retrospectively inaccurate and biased!

 

Now you see why we need Fox News as a counterweight.