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Yesterday, Jon Stewart did an extraordinarily revealing interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace. Stewart's critique of Fox and of the rest of the media, particularly for their preference for sensationalism, isn't particularly new. What was so interesting, however, was the way Wallace tried to make his own case. He was intent on demonstrating that Stewart is a liberal activist who happens to use comedy to advance his ideological agenda, while Stewart contended that he is a comedian whose primary interest is in creating satire, even if it is motivated by his own ideology. (This, by the way, explains why conservative attempts to duplicate the success of The Daily Show, like the Fox program The ½ Hour News Hour, have failed so miserably. They were trying to use comedy to advance a political agenda, and it just wasn't funny.) Wallace couldn't seem to wrap his head around the idea that Stewart has any concern other than ideology. So as proof of the general proposition that Fox is an oasis in a sea of liberal bias, he aired two clips. One was Diane Sawyer somewhat mischaracterizing Arizona's SB1070, as though it were some kind of smoking gun of hopeless liberal bias, and the other was a clip from a Comedy Central roast of Pamela Anderson. The first was about as weak a piece of evidence as one could imagine, and Wallace's point in the second seemed to be, "Hey, there's crap on your network too!", a contention Stewart was happy to agree with. Wallace didn't seem to get that he was making Stewart's point for him. Is a roast of Pamela Anderson as idiotic as an episode of Hannity? You bet. But only one of them claims to be informing you about the news. To his credit, Wallace can be a tough interviewer with Republicans as well as Democrats. But when you work at Fox, there's one thing you have to accept, even more than conservative ideology. It's the idea that Fox is the only unbiased news outlet there is. Everyone else who claims to deliver the news is liberally biased, and anyone who criticizes Fox can only be doing so because of their liberal bias. So Stewart's criticisms of the media as a whole for being absurdly sensationalistic kind of bounced off Wallace, as though his only frame of reference is an ideological one, and the only way someone would be able to disagree with Fox is in a mirror-image way. From within that bubble, everything makes a kind of sense. And what's really handy about it is that it enables them to dismiss the substance of any and all criticism. If you believe that all of your critics are motivated by nothing more than an ideological agenda, you never have to bother wondering whether they might have a point.
