Jon Stewart talks a lot of trash about cable news. But occasionally the TV treatment of a story is too good to pass up.
Enter Russian President Vladimir Putin and our own President Barack Obama. At the G20 summit in Mexico, the world leaders’ body language was icy at best. MSNBC and CNN wondered whether it was worth covering the tense subtext at all. Fox News, without blinking, knew it was.
“That’s why you can appreciate the genius of Fox News,” Stewart said. “They see this, they immediately know what it is and that it’s enormously important.”
After Fox showed a clip of Ronald Reagan looking strong and stately during the Cold War, Stewart was satisfied.
“That, my friends, is how it’s done,” he said. “That’s how you take a few seconds of Obama video, turn it into a rich soup of decontextualized imagery designed to bypass the frontal cortex and go straight to the amygdala of old people, triggering cascades of dopamine and giving them all a giant Reagan boner. It’s why they’re No. 1.”
Watch the video:
| The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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David Taintor
David Taintor is TPM’s News Editor. He contributes to TPM’s Livewire coverage, among other areas. David is from Chanhassen, Minnesota, where, yes, it gets very cold. Reach him at taintor [at] talkingpointsmemo.com
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