Calling Them on It

Jon Stewart talks to Bill Moyers:

MOYERS: What do you see that we journalists don't see?

STEWART: I think we see exactly what you do see but for some reason don't analyze it in that manner or put it on the air in that manner. I can't tell ya how many times we'll run into a journalist who will go, "Boy I wish we could be saying that. That's exactly the way we see it and that's exactly the way we'd like to be saying that."

And I always think, well, why don't you?....

MOYERS: Which is funnier? CROSSFIRE or HARD BALL?

STEWART: CROSSFIRE or HARDBALL? Which is funnier? Which is more soul-crushing, you mean? Both are equally dispiriting in their the whole idea that political discourse has degenerated into shows that have to be entitled Crossfire and Hardball. ...

Crossfire, especially, is completely an apropos name. It's what innocent bystanders are caught in when gangs are fighting. And it just boggles my mind that that's given a half hour, an hour a day to-- I don't understand how issues can be dissected-- from the left and from the right as though-- even cartoon characters have more than left and right. They have up and down....

These years are upsetting because I feel like we're being gas lit as a country in that what we see going on is just being described as the opposite relentlessly by you know the administration. ...

MOYERS: Friday, front page headline: War's Cost Bring Democratic Anger. I mean these are the guys who voted for the war.

STEWART: You don't want to get the Democrats angry, because then they'll maybe meet in private....

MOYERS: And what is the media doing to help us sort us out?

STEWART: Oh. they're not. They sat this one out. Yeah, they're not getting involved. It's very tiring. And they have weather reports to give....

MOYERS: Why is it that President Bush has to go to South Africa to be asked a critical question about nuclear weapons of mass destruction?

STEWART: Because in the United States he doesn't see anybody in the press. He's in a small room, with a treadmill, that he runs on. And a little "brush-to-clear" diorama. He is not exposed in any way.

You know what's great? Watch a Bush press conference, and then turn on Tony Blair and Parliament. Where he literally has to sit in front of his most vociferous critic. And that critic will say, "Sir, on the 13th, the dossier of the French, not the nuclear. You were hiding things. How do you answer, sir?"

"The distinguished gentleman is wrong. I can prove it in this way." Contrast that with the press conference that Bush had on the eve of war [Dull, robotic voice]: "Uh, okay, the next question is-- Jim. Is there a Jim here? Yeah. You got the next one. [Pause.] That is not the agreed-upon question. We're gonna move on. Ralph, you got something?"

It an incredibly managed, theatrical farce. And it's incredible to me that people are playing along with it. And they say that they're playing along with it because they're afraid of losing access. You don't have any access! There's nothing to lose!...

What the representatives have done over 200 years is set up a periphery, I think they call it the Beltway-- that is obtuse enough that we can't penetrate it anymore, unless we spend all of our time. This is the way that it's been set up purposefully by both sides. And the financial industry, as well.

They don't want average people to easily penetrate the workings. Because then we call them on it.