Jon Stewart on Crossfire

I finally sat down and watched the video of Jon Stewart on Crossfire on CNN the other day. I'd heard a lot about his appearance, and so I grabbed a copy off bittorrent to take a look.

From the first moment, from Jon Stewart's first words, he's clearly serious. Despite his normal ability to be funny while acting serious, from the first moment on Crossfire I could tell he was going to say something he really wasn't looking forward to saying.

It's really painful to watch a good comedian be serious when the audience doesn't realize what he's doing. The dude with the normal tie seemed to be laughing at completely inappropriate moments in the beginning, but then realized Jon was serious. The guy in the bowtie clearly wasn't getting it. And didn't want to.

Watching these guys attack Jon for not asking John Kerry hard-hitting questions when Jon doesn't claim to be a newsman... while they do claim to be serious newsmen and are really just complete partisan hacks... as Jon pointed out... it was sickening.

This wasn't a pleasant show to watch, but it was definitely Jon Stewart telling the media off, something which needed to be done by someone. I was not impressed by the CNN guys, who seemed desperate to avoid actually answering Jon's accusation and his plea, and the one in the bowtie in particular who seemed simply incapable of understanding what Jon was trying to say and determined to get Jon to insult him by insulting him first, repeatedly.

And he looked utterly ridiculous in the bowtie, by the way. Like a little boy playing dress-up. The other guy at least clued in to what Jon was saying and managed to avoid making himself look worse. But then, he was wearing a normal tie, so he already appeared more intelligent... and both of them looked like morons compared to Jon.