Jon Stewart v Chris Matthews Part III
Jim Babka on Apr 4th 2008
Jon Stewart did it again: He played Chris Matthews for (as) the fool. By my count, that’s three times now. Hooray!
In this latest installment, broadcast April 3, 2008, Jon did a segment he called, “Obama Watch.” The prime target of the lampooning was Fox News Sunday and its host, Chris Wallace.
I don’t want to ruin it for you — since you can watch the video for yourself — but the utter silliness of Hardball is on full display in this brief clip. Hardball is almost devoid of content. It should come with a Surgeon General’s warning because you get dumber as you watch it. I’ve lost some brain cells myself.
In this clip, Matthews displays his court jester repertoire, which is amusing all by itself. But Chris also sets up the punchline as well and Barak Obama smacks him down.
Spoiler Alert: Chris Matthews is the punchline: You’ll say to yourself, “He had it coming.”
Yes, I enjoy seeing Chris Matthews kicked around by Jon Stewart. But it’s not like Stewart will be out of material. The world would be a better place if Chris Matthews was booted off the air.
Oh, Hardball delenda est. Hardball delenda est. Sweet Jesus, Hardball delenda est.
(Hardball must be destroyed)
Filed in The Bureau
At the risk of sounding like a Chris Matthews supporter (and, btw, I don’t even get cable!), I found Stewart sadly, typically smarmy in that bit. I thought the first confrontation mildly amusing but the premise completely bogus.
The fact is that even hard news programs on all of television are entertainment. Occasionally useful entertainment, sure, but the notion that Walter Cronkite was doing something fundamentally different than Ed Sullivan or Jackie Gleason always struck me as both pompous and false.
But that being an equation, Stewart cannot simply ignore the role the Daily Show plays in “informing” its audience about current events by saying, oh, hey, I’m just a comedian doing a topical comedy show on Comedy Central. He knows what his demographics are and he knows that much of his audience do, in fact, use his show as their primary source of news. And as every Spider Man fan knowns (Spider Man fans being roughly the same demographic, I suspect, as Daily Show fans), from great power comes great responsibility.
People who watch Matthews for the most part know very well that they’re watching advocacy journalism and commentary and, when they stop to think about it, they know that the sort of advocacy journalism and commentary they have chosen to watch or listen to feeds their own political dispositions else they’d be listening to Air America or whatever. My guess, however, is that far fewer of those people rely on Matthews for their news than do Stewart.