Fair and Balanced

A nice little TV political morality play took place Sunday on Fox when Jon Stewart appeared on Chris Wallace’s show. I didn’t see it at the time, which is just as well, because an important segment, which network wisely decided worked to its embarrassment, had been deleted. However, the entire interview is available on the electronic media.*

I haven’t seen enough of Wallace to know how he conducts himself when interviewing someone he isn’t trying to deligitimize. With Stewart he was stiff as a board, obtrusive and appeared to be doing a lot of smirking.

Stewart was funny, natural and as informative as he could be given the host’s understandable propensity to interrupt. After saying that he was a comedian first who was “ideologically informed,” he was accused moments later of being “only” a “comedian,” to which he took issue articulately and, in the opinion of this admittedly biased observer, mopped the floor with Wallace.(I think of Stewart as more humorist than comedian)

The exchange that was edited out of the show went as follows; Stewart “So you believe that Fox News is exactly the ideological equivalent of NBC News?” Wallace; “I think they’re the counterweight. I think that they [NBC] have a liberal agenda and I think we tell the other side of the story but…..since this is my show I’m asking the questions.” Stewart; “I’m sorry. I won’t get my parking invalidated will I?”

There are sharp differences of opinion over the nature of the “agenda” of the mainstream media. But it’s now etched in stone that Chris Wallace, the “good face” of Fox, that network’s attempt to present what Walter Cronkite was to CBS, has inadvertently admitted that his employers are trying to “tell the other side of the story.” It’s little wonder that this segment was deleted from the broadcast. It’s also to the nation’s edification that it was preserved. It paints a clearer picture of what these people mean by “fair and balanced.”

 

*There are several sites on the internet showing this interview. The entire time was 24 minutes and 11 seconds. Anything shorter consists of selected segments and probably excludes the deleted part. Still Wallace makes nearly the same point, a bit more subtly, at other times in the interview.