Jon Stewart sat down with Rachel Maddow last night, to defend some of the criticism he’s been getting over his speech at the Rally To Restore Sanity, which has been derided as painting a false equivalence between Fox News and the rest of cable news. Stewart told Maddow that his point was that cable news networks have allowed the left and the right to become the fight, and it “amplifies a division that I don’t actually think is the right fight.”
“Anybody who has watched our show in any measure would understand the special place in our hearts for Fox,” Stewart said, but “we have a tendency to grant amnesty to people we agree with, and to over-demonize people we don’t.”
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He said: “Look at the difference between the top story on cable news and the top story in the newspaper. You would have thought Juan Williams killed people. It was everywhere. And the reason that it was everywhere was because it fell so beautifully into the narrative” of left versus right.
“Networks are not meant to be viewed in aggregate,” he said, but in aggregate, “there’s an effect.” And though Jon acknowledged that he has a lot of influence himself, it “is not then reinforced through the next person” who comes on the air.
Here’s the full interview:
