Jon Stewart on CNN's Crossfire

BoldAC writes "Instead of plugging his new book, Jon Stewart tonight on CNN's Crossfire used his time to slam the media's coverage of the election. Although Stewart leans left, he attacked political shows and begged them: 'Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.' Is it time to really stop all the political games that both sides play? Torrent of the event is available." And another set of .torrent links.

Comments

ifilm

[avageek]

video of it is also posted on ifilm

More sources

[ylikone]

The video can also be found here in a few different formats... if the server isn't already dead...

http://www.contemporaryinsanity.org/video/

This was...

[Sheetrock]

One of the coolest things I've seen on TV since O'Reilly vs. Franken on C-Span BookTV.

Journalism standards have gone down the toilet. Kudos to Stewart for giving these folks a metaphorical kick to the nuts on live television -- wasn't a fan before, starting to become one now.

He's just so right; when a satirical news program on a minor cable channel meets or exceeds the journalistic bar in this country, to the point of winning awards and in many cases being the only news people will watch, you get an idea of just why things are so screwed and why so many people continue to buy into the two-party system. The media isn't conservative, and it certainly isn't liberal... it's simply profitable.

Re:This was...

[po8]

NPR has manipulated laws and its public "competition" to the point where it has a near-monopoly on non-profit radio in the United States. For example, they have consistently sided with commercial broadcasters against allowing low-power (and thus low-cost) FM radio stations. Some college radio stations were driven off the air when NPR successfully lobbied the FCC to kill their licenses soon after it was formed.

Keep in mind that NPR is a medium-sized corporation: it pays salaries to quite a few people, owns infrastructure and facilities, etc. It has about the same set of concerns as any (privately-held) broadcasting corporation, including increasing market share and revenue.

In addition, as you observe, NPR is funded directly by the same large corporations that fund the Democratic and Republican parties. While I'm skeptical that there's explicit tying of donations to content, I'm sure that NPR is careful to keep its overall format fundable.

Re:Political torrents

[ivan37]

Suprnova had torrents of all of the debates a day or two after (although those are the only political torrents I've seen).

Re:Political torrents

[stevenrace]

Apple's iTunes Music Store offers free downloads of the presidential debates usually the day after.

Re:Best quotes

[AntsInMyPants]

What makes this even better is the tone, which you obviously can't get from the transcript.

Jon's was one of quiet exasperation coupled with legitimate anger, and just a dash of contempt.

Carlsons' tone was one of self-righteousness, followed quickly by stammering, defensiveness, and forced-incredulity.

Begala (who I otherwise despise) was at least wise enough to keep quiet through most of it. He seemed to understand that they were screwed.

Re:Attention Slashdot Laser:

[TheSHAD0W]

It'd take tens of thousands of downloaders to slashdot a tracker on even a marginal server.

Non-torrent links

[gad_zuki!]

Here

and here

Re:Carlson has a point though...

[gad_zuki!]

He was also softball with:

Henry Kissinger (most of the world considers him a war criminal)

Karen Hughes (Bush's campaign manager)

Ed Gillespie (RNC chairman/cheerleader)

Its just not a hard-news talk show. And its a comedy show which makes no promises about being fair, honest, or anything.

That said, you should watch the show more often as softball is all that goes on there, with a few exceptions.

Carlson doesnt have a point. Carlson needed to save face after he was exposed to be below the level of the daily show in terms of credibility. That's as low as you can get.

Re:Is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then contact CNN and let them know you fully agree.

http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form1.html?21

Maybe that will wake up a few people.

Re:Listen to yourselves

[FungiFromYuggoth]

Sorry, but you are a cranky crack monkey.

The state of journalism today is an absolute embarassment. It's all about being servants to the powerful, not comforting the powerless and watching the powerful.

Stewart is concerned about TV news - he parodies it. If the media looked at the funhouse mirror, they might think about what they're doing. He came on to talk seriously about them.

I don't think that "tough questions" was the focus of what Stewart was saying - just that shouting head journalism was hurting America. There is a line between infotainment and disinfotainment, but I'll definitely agree that neither one is truly informative.

IMHO, the primary problem with modern US journalism - and this ties into shouting heads - is that no one is willing to say that X is true. The media would much rather say "Well, the Republicans say X, the Democrats say Y", and then punt their responsibilities.

Some people watch the daily show for news because they like to be infotained; other people realize the layers of BS caking the mainstream media. Me, I don't rely on the US media to tell me what color the sky is. (Although I do have to recommend this article on the faith-based presidentcy.

It's by that bastion of the truth that brought us Judith Miller, Whitewater, and Wen Ho Lee. What was that about the Daily Show being pathetic?

Re:Lone Slashdot Conservative Responds...

[Idarubicin]

Now I am going to get pummled by Mods I know :) I see my comments go up and down from +4 to +0 in the course of a single hour as Slashdot is overwhelminingly a left-wing Noam Chomsky echo chamber...

This may, possibly, have something to do with prefacing your remarks with a tacit invitation to flamewar?

Actually, this is rather the point Jon Stewart was trying to make. Modern news/talk/interview programs very seldom engage in the actual debate that is so important to a functional political process. Shows like Crossfire epitomize the problem. In lieu of debate, one sees screaming heads parroting party-line talking points and engaging in as much intellectual dishonesty and name-calling as they think they can get away with.

If you get past the fact that Jon Stewart leans to the left and actually listen to what he said, you might find that you agree with him--he genuinely seems to believe in vigorous, honest debate, and he rightly calls the partisan hacks on Crossfire on their own lack of depth, substance, or independent thought.

Re:That guy sis damn funny.

[LuxFX]

I heard he was on the Factor

Actually, that interview led to a particularly amusing bit of research. Comedy Central, although open enough to the fact that O'Reilly was just joking in fun when he said that nothing but "stoned slackers watch your dopey show", didn't like the misconception it reflected. So, they had Nielson Media do some research....

It turned out that viewers of The Daily Show were more likely to have completed a four-year college than viewers of The Factor.

Atlantic Monthly article on Karl Rove

[maynard]

Don't miss this Atlantic Monthly article by Joshua Green on Karl Rove and his history of campaign dirty tricks. The story to which you refer is presented there in detail:

A typical instance occurred in the hard-fought 1996 race for a seat on the Alabama Supreme Court between Rove's client, Harold See, then a University of Alabama law professor, and the Democratic incumbent, Kenneth Ingram. According to someone who worked for him, Rove, dissatisfied with the campaign's progress, had flyers printed up--absent any trace of who was behind them--viciously attacking See and his family. "We were trying to craft a message to reach some of the blue-collar, lower-middle-class people," the staffer says. "You'd roll it up, put a rubber band around it, and paperboy it at houses late at night. I was told, 'Do not hand it to anybody, do not tell anybody who you're with, and if you can, borrow a car that doesn't have your tags.' So I borrowed a buddy's car [and drove] down the middle of the street ... I had Hefty bags stuffed full of these rolled-up pamphlets, and I'd cruise the designated neighborhoods, throwing these things out with both hands and literally driving with my knees." The ploy left Rove's opponent at a loss. Ingram's staff realized that it would be fruitless to try to persuade the public that the See campaign was attacking its own candidate in order "to create a backlash against the Democrat," as Joe Perkins, who worked for Ingram, put it to me. Presumably the public would believe that Democrats were spreading terrible rumors about See and his family. "They just beat you down to your knees," Ingram said of being on the receiving end of Rove's attacks. See won the race.

Or a whisper campaign against Alabama state supreme court justice Mark Kennedy, who was unjustly smeared as a peadophile:

Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out--he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."

There's plenty more stories to read. all of which would make any honest person want to puke. Republicans only damage their own credibility by supporting this crap on the national stage. At some point these tactics will backfire and the GOP will wind up badly damaged as a result. JMO. --M

First, lay off the "poor me" intro.

[khasim]

Now I am going to get pummled by Mods I know :) I see my comments go up and down from +4 to +0 in the course of a single hour as Slashdot is overwhelminingly a left-wing Noam Chomsky echo chamber but here goes:

Don't blame others for your faults and do not attempt to catagorize people you've never communicated with.

I read the transcript and I didn't see John Stewart actually say anything.

He said that the "debate" shows were useless as far as actual news or discussion or debate. He said that such shows were tools of the political parties and did nothing to inform their audience. He said that their shows were pure entertainment.

Knock of the "Dialectical" and "Dualism" crap. Both are wrong. The fact is that every single person in the US has his/her own viewpoint and values and so forth. In the end, it comes down to how to spend a limited amount of money/time/people on all the different goals of all the different people.

This evolved from the Judeo-Christian idea of origional sin. That we are not perfect. That we will never be absolutely perfect though we can strive to perfection. The political process for a dualist is a constant war of ideas, compromise and experimentation, moving more slowly toward a better political organization.

Great, whatever. Why does anyone care what this mythical idiot thinks?

If you ask 100 random people to rank 100 goals in order of priority/importance/value, you'll get 100 different answers.

How to attain the goal is not know to a dualist, he realizes that much debate, experimentation and examination of details must occur before things improve.

That's great if there are only two people to be considered. There is no "right" or "wrong". There are only goals and the means by which you attempt to achieve those goals.

The dialecticist on the other hand is far more arrogant believing he can put together the whole solution and all that remains is to push aside the debaters and doubters and implement his vision.

Pay close attention to current politics. Do you see that happening a lot? I thought so.

Yet it seems that you favour your "Dualism" approach.

Here's some advice. Pull yourself out of the crap you learned in Philosophy 101 and look around the world today. Talk to people. LISTEN to people.

Stewart was presenting his beliefs on that show. One of his beliefs is that their show was of a specific format, when it should have been of a different format. He stated that point and illustrated that point very well.

Re:Attention Slashdot Laser:

[Thing 1]

That's not entirely accurate, because not everyone is downloading. As I said in another response to the parent, I'm currently getting download speeds over 200 KB/s, and am connected to 4609 seeds and 902 peers.

So the number of people downloading is only 902, whereas there are 4609+902=5511 people uploading. So if upload speeds are 1/5 download speeds, everyone will be getting it at their maximum download rate.

That's the cool thing about BitTorrent; if people leave their torrents open when they're done, everyone else gets it much faster.