Appetite For Distraction: Fox News Gets Taken To The Woodshed By Jon Stewart

On The Daily Show Tuesday night, Jon Stewart took on Fox News and how they treat the President. In a brilliant opening segment, Stewart first tackled Bill O’Reilly’s pre-Super Bowl interview with President Obama. He joked that O’Reilly considered himself the world’s most powerful man.

Stewart then highlighted how Obama took Fox News to task for constantly focusing on supposed ‘scandals’ and making it difficult to discuss anything serious with the American people. In essence, Obama told O’Reilly that his network was not fair to him.

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Stewart then shifted gears and discussed Fox News as a whole. Basically, he pinpointed how the personalities keep acting like anything the President does is a distraction for the ‘real issues.’ Of course, the real issues are any specific negative narrative that Fox News wants to focus on that particular day. Stewart highlighted many examples of FNC hosts and contributors claiming Obama was using new speeches and discussion of other issues to misdirect and distract the American people from all the ‘scandals’ hitting his administration.

Finally, Stewart hammered the conservative news network for completely chasing its tail on this particular narrative loop they’ve found themselves in. He showed them saying that the President wants to distract from the economy only to later show them shouting about Obama talking about the economy to distract from scandals. Inevitably, Stewart, once again, nailed Fox News as nothing but an anger machine that just wants to get ‘real Americans’ riled up on a daily basis in order to keep the status quo and keep the traditional power structure in place.

When Jon Stewart is able to aim his comedy gun at an easy target like Fox News and Bill O’Reilly, you usually get something brilliant like we saw Tuesday night. He was completely on the mark with Fox News’ use of distraction in order to get Americans watching ‘news’ angered by this President. Keep hammering them, Jon!

Justin Baragona

Justin Baragona is the Managing Editor at Politicus Sports as well as Senior Editor at PoliticusUSA. He was a political writer for 411Mania.com before joining PoliticusUSA. Politically, Justin considers himself a liberal but also a realist and pragmatist. Currently, Justin lives in St. Louis, MO and is married. Besides writing, he also runs his own business after spending a number of years in the corporate world. You can follow Justin on Twitter either with his personal handle (@justinbaragona) or the Sports site’s (@PoliticusSports).