Jon Stewart started off Tuesday’s edition of “The Daily Show” with a heavy heart, reporting on questions surrounding the integrity of his favorite sparring partner, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.
“Really?” Stewart said of the media pile-on after Mother Jones reported that O’Reilly may have embellished or manufactured stories about his reporting from Argentina during the Falklands War.
“We’re going after O’Reilly for exaggerating being in a war zone?” he continued. “I don’t know if you watch his program.”
Pointing out O’Reilly’s longtime slogan, “You’re in the no-spin zone,” Stewart added that “misrepresenting the ‘zone’ he’s in is kinda his hook!”
As Stewart did during the the Brian Williams affair, in which the NBC anchor was caught peddling a bogus war story, he urged viewers to put media scandals in perspective as more consequential lies emerge on the world stage.
“Here’s the problem: World outrage supplies are finite, and if we spend so much of it on the fairly inconsequential status embellishments, our anger tanks could be empty when we need them most!” Stewart said.
Case in point: Reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahi may have knowingly misled the United Nations on Iran’s capacity to produce nuclear weapons, contradicting Israel’s own intelligence.
“See. This is the shit we should be looking into,” Stewart said, flashing an image of Netanyahu at the U.N. in 2012 next to a still of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s famously misleading U.N. address prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“Because it seems to me we might all just be a little better off if the exaggerations about covering a war get less attention than the exaggerations that get us into so many of them,” Stewart said.
Watch the clip, courtesy of Comedy Central:
