Jon Stewart couldn’t help but laugh at the media controversy surrounding Bill O’Reilly, who allegedly exaggerated his war zone experiences in Buenos Aires during the Falkland Islands war.
“Really? We’re going after O’Reilly for exaggerating being in a war zone? I don’t know if you watch his program. Misrepresenting the zone he is in is kind of his hook,” Stewart said of the Fox News personality during “The Daily Show” on Tuesday. “No one’s watching him for the actual truth.”
Stewart mocked Mother Jones, the online publication leading the charge against O’Reilly, for bringing “a magazine article to a TV fight.”
“You’re basically putting in a tremendous amount of work to say, ‘The emperor has no clothes,’ while the emperor has spent 20 years saying, ‘Look at my dick, I’m naked!’” Stewart joked.
Stewart, however, had a larger lesson in mind while talking about the charges against O’Reilly that are similar to those levied against suspended NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who admitted to embellishing his experience aboard a military helicopter during the Iraq War in 2003.
“Here’s the problem: World outrage supplies are finite, and if we spend so much of it on the fairly inconsequential status embellishments, our anger tanks could be empty when we need them most,” Stewart said. “We all might be a little better off if the exaggerations about covering a war get less attention than the exaggerations that got us into so many of them.”
