Former host of the Daily Show Jon Stewart is in the news again, sitting down with fellow comedian Dave Chappelle and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview. He laments the days of Donald Trump’s candidacy and the way he handled it.
After showing a clip of Stewart calling Trump “a gift from heaven,” Amanpour asked if Stewart should’ve taken him more seriously.
“Yeah. Now,” Stewart said with a smirk. “I thought America was gonna go, ‘is that an escalator in a mall? I’m not gonna vote for that dude.'”
Despite airing his regrets, he also dropped a fair amount of wisdom about the divide between President Trump and the media.
“Journalists have taken it personally,” Stewart noted. “They’re personally wounded and offended by this man. He baits them and they dive in. What he’s done well, I thought, is appeal to their own narcissism, to their own ego.”
Is Stewart suggesting that the media is filled with thin-skinned narcissists? Maybe. You could sense in the interview that Amanpour was having a tough time accepting Stewart’s answer as legitimate.
Obviously, Trump’s rhetoric has been divisive, and he hasn’t exactly tried to unite the country. But neither have some members of the press, and that’s what Stewart is getting at here. And it’s a valid point to make.
In the days following the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa., that left 11 Jewish worshippers dead, GQ correspondent Julia Ioffe went on CNN and said that Trump “had radicalized so many more people than ISIS ever did.” Ioffe later apologized after for her incendiary remarks, saying she said them in the heat of the moment.
You can still support the press, but you shouldn’t ignore the consequences of their behavior. And like Stewart being held accountable for calling Trump “a gift from heaven,” members of the media should be called out and not take everything so personally.
