Here’s what Jon Stewart said at the Rally over the weekend:
The country’s 24-hour, political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen. Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire, and then perhaps host a week of shows on the dangerous, unexpected flaming ants epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.
And here are Keith Olbermann’s comments about it:
It wasn’t a big shark but Jon Stewart jumped one just now with the “everybody on Thr cable is the same” naiveté
The America before today’s cable wasn’t reasonable discussion.It was the 1-sided lockstep of Fox and people afraid of Fox.That got us Iraq.
I wish it were otherwise. But you can tone down all you want and the result will be: the Right will only get LOUDER. Sorry.
Part of the problem with the media is fear; news outlets are afraid of offending their sponsors and owners, now that most of them are owned by just a few huge conglomerates. We saw that in the run up to the war in Iraq. Nobody wanted to appear unpatriotic. Phil Donahue had his show canceled from MSNBC because he spoke out against the Bush administration. The news media just regurgitated the propaganda from the White House and all stories critical of the intelligence were buried. As a result, well over 4,000 American soldiers and some 100,000 Iraqi civilians died. The cost of the two wars is estimated at 3 trillion dollars.
Another problem with the news media is they feel they have to balance everything — that the facts have to be balanced with a right-wing spin on the facts. There are absolutes in our world. If the vast majority of scientists believe in anthropomorphic global warming, there’s no reason to give the few who don’t, equal credibility, especially since it usually turns out they are in the pockets of the oil industry.
And finally, right-wingers like to claim that the left-wing equivalents to Hannity, Beck, O’Reilly, Limbaugh, et. al. are Olbermann and Maddow, but that’s not accurate. The left-wing equivalents are Jesse Jackson and Amy Goodmann, and even they’re not as extreme. Their real equals would be the Black Panthers or Bill Ayers if they had cable commentary shows.
DRUDGE RETORT 