Jon Stewart Tears Into ‘Narcissistic Media’ Response to Mass Shootings: ‘Who the F*ck Cares?!’
The Daily Show host Jon Stewart tore into the “narcissistic media” response to mass shootings on Monday, accusing liberal and conservative cable news networks of trying to politicize tragedies by blaming the other side.
“There’s a mass shooting now like every couple of hours,” Stewart observed during his monologue. “Previously, the routine would be we express our shock; we express our sadness; we offer our thoughts and prayers; we spend a day, maybe two, arguing about the appropriateness of bringing up guns at all; and then we do nothing until the next time. But as our politics becomes more polarized, even that learned cycle of helplessness has been replaced by a new, post-shooting pastime. That new pastime is, ‘Was this one of yours?'”
Stewart then played a compilation of liberal and conservative cable news hosts, from Newsmax to MSNBC, blaming the other side for various recent shootings.
“It’s America’s new gender reveal tradition!” he reacted. “The game is so ubiquitous, now we often play it before we even know who the perpetrator is.”
Stewart remarked, “Now call me old-fashioned, but I miss the good old days of mass shootings when networks took a principled stance to not shower attention on acts designed to get attention,” before continuing:
So why has the news media become obsessed with right-left framing of violence? Well part of the reason is they are following the lead of social media. Social media is doing it crazier and faster than anybody else, so the media is trying to keep up. The fire in the church in Michigan was still burning when online influencers were inferring that the number of Muslims in Michigan are what obviously made this attack happen… until police released the suspect’s photo, which looked like it came from a Duck Dynasty fan-fic account, and then the left got to celebrate. And then they found a Trump-Vance sign on his house. Case closed. Except, that sign was placed near a stop sign, so some on the right said, “No, no, no. He’s saying stop Trump-Vance.”
He concluded, “But here’s the thing, who the f*ck cares? These mass shootings do not fit neatly into our left-right paradigm. Mass shootings are probably caused by a complex fusion of mental health and access to weapons and attention-seeking, delusional nihilism, married to an algorithmic underworld that set these horrific acts in motion. But unfortunately, left-right paradigm is the only way our narcissistic media ecosystem sees anything anymore. That’s the system they built, so it must fit into the right-left paradigm, because that binary is the foundation of all of their programming.”
Watch above via The Daily Show.
