Lots o’ fun at the WaPo chats today. Tucker Carlson is still whining about the time Jon Stewart dissed him:
Falls Church: Tucker: saw you on Reliable Sources talking about Cramer v. Stewart. You know, the whole world is not divided up into the vast left-wing conspiracy and the brave moral right that fights against it.
There are legitimate journalistic questions about the role of a financial channel and how much cheer leading it should do or if the interviewers sometimes treat business leaders like Access Hollywood treats celebrities or if they should be in the business of investigating corrupt businesses and business practices.
But to dismiss those questions as an Obama surrogate hit job… No wonder the majority of the country thinks the right is out of touch with reality.
Tucker Carlson:
……Stewart’s answer invariably is: I’m a comedian. That’s not my job. But that’s a dodge, and increasingly unsustainable. In fact, Stewart is a player in the national conversation. He seeks to influence politics and policy, and he succeeds. It’s time for him to admit that, and be held to the same standards everyone else at his level (including Jim Kramer) lives by.
and
Jon Stewart: Methinks Jon does a much better job than the traditional media in holding folks accountable for what they put out there. He is right, he is a comedian – and he tries to show (in my opinion) how easy it is to debunk most of what is presented if one wanted to. Most MSM shows, now that Russert is no longer in the gotcha game, rarely calls the so-called experts and politicos on anything. They just listen, over maybe a partial debate and move on. Rather than saying and presenting the facts from their own mouths that say – uh… wait a minute here you’re wrong and misleading.
Tucker Carlson: I agree with you to this extent: If a phony like Jon Stewart is conducting the best interviews out there, the mainstream press is in deep trouble.
Stewart a is “phony” who doesn’t live up to “his own standards”? Is a a political discussion or “Catcher In the Rye”?
But Tucker Carlson makes a fool of himself all the time, so that’s hardly news. What’s most exciting to me is that Emily Yoffe of “Dear Prudence” is on at 1. She wrote what may be the most absurd piece in the history of the Washington Post, a hit piece on Al Gore about global warming. The beauty of this — and what makes it so absurd — is that she has admitted that she tests a first-grade level in math, yet she saw fit to comment on a largely quantitative theory (see Somerby for more).
There’s very little chance she’ll take my question, but I thought I’d give it a try:
Dear Prudence,
An advice columnist I know wrote an absurd piece attacking Al Gore for his research of global warming (“Gloom and Doom in A Sunny Day”, Washington Post, Monday, June 25, 2007). She did this despite the fact that global warming arguments are quantitative and she is a self-described math moron. What should I tell her?