Jon Stewart entered Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone” last night, in the first night of a two-part interview with the Fox News host. Part two airs tonight.
The interview was largely pretty civil and friendly — and Stewart and O’Reilly debated a number of issues, from President Obama’s first-year performance to Republican obstructionism to Fox News’ objectivity.
Early in the interview, O’Reilly read a quote from the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz saying that Stewart had become an “important cultural arbiter.”
“That is frightening though,” O’Reilly said (he’d earlier declared that “a lot of people don’t think you’re smart”). O’Reilly then asked Stewart if he understood “the implications of you being important in any context?”
“Well, I think my family loves me,” Stewart replied.
O’Reilly defended the division between news and opinion at Fox, saying the network is clear about which shows are which.
“C’mon, Stewart. Wise up, man,” he said. “Everybody knows this. People watching in Pakistan. They got a little DIRECTV.”
Then, adopting a strange accent, O’Reilly apparently tried to imitate one of these Pakistanis.
“They go, ‘That O’Reilly opinion show.’ They know.”
Stewart looked a little baffled and amused: “Why do they use that accent?”
Stewart acknowledged that Fox News “is the most passionate and sells the clearest narrative of any news organization” before stopping at that phrase. “Are you still referring to it in that manner?” he asked.
On Obama, Stewart said, “I can’t tell if he’s a jedi master playing chess on a three-level board way ahead of us or if this is kicking his ass.”
Here’s the first part of last night’s interview:
Things got a little more heated later, when O’Reilly said Stewart couldn’t refute his examples with his “propaganda.” Stewart, somewhat surprisingly, responded to that line of attack by declaring that O’Reilly had “become the most reasonable voice on Fox” — though he equated that to being “the thinnest kid at fat camp.”
There was a glimpse of some fireworks that might air tonight, when Stewart declared that Fox News had taken reasonable concerns about Obama and the economy and turned them into “a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao.”
