Jon Stewart excoriated CNN on Tuesday for the news network’s speculation-heavy coverage of the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard.
When it comes to “sheer accumulation of breathless wrongness,” the “Daily Show” host said, “there’s really only one source that matters.”
Stewart ripped a CNN reporter who, while on the scene of the shooting, simply stood “in front of a camera naming sh*t” he saw. But Stewart saved his most brutal takedown for CNN host Wolf Blitzer, who acknowledged on-air that his “initial conclusions” of the shooting could turn out to be “very, very wrong.”
“Yes! They can be very, very wrong,” Stewart said. “So don’t say them out loud. If it’s an urge inside of you that you have to get out, have a speculation jar.”
And Stewart said that CNN isn’t excused simply by providing caveats.
“I know you think that saying ‘this could all be wrong’ makes it okay to say it, but it doesn’t make it okay. No one else in the world is allowed to operate that way,” Stewart said, imagining a doctor who provides a patient with an uncertain cancer diagnosis.
