Tag Results for Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? Of course. Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and David Letterman? Completely expected. Robert Gibbs? Can you blame him? Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC? No thanks.

Sarah Palin's use of notes scribbled on her hand during her talk to the National Tea Party Convention has launched a veritable Greek comedic chorus of talking heads goofing on her for getting caught. On Palin's end, it's richly deserved. She'd been hitting the president hard for being just some "charismatic guy with a teleprompter," the clear implication of which was that Obama's attempts to rally the nation around issues like education and health care were coming from some speechwriter, not his heart. Then she gets caught palm-peeking like some middle schooler in a geometry final so she won't forget to mention things like "tax cuts" and "lift American spirits" - no-brainer Republican talking points which presumably should be coming from her heart rather than her palm.

Well, I was enjoying the humor as much as anyone until I saw Andrea Mitchell chime in on MSNBC. I'm sure it felt just too good to resist, but Mitchell should have done so anyway. Satirists and comedians are a dime a dozen these days, but respected journalists who play it straight are in increasingly short supply.

"Beat the Press" panelists sound off on their rants and raves of the week: Topics include the Tea Party closes its doors to the media; Candy Crowley's new gig at CNN; demanding more transparency from South Hadley school officials following a student's suicide; Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly square off; and Katie Couric's photoshoot for Harpar's Bazaar.

The media-watch vultures have begun to circle over MSNBC weeknights at 8 p.m., anticipating that the show widely considered to be the great liberal counterbalance to Fox News will soon be a bloated carcass.

Jeff Bercovici, the media guy for Aol Daily Finance, says Olberman's ratings in the 25-54 demographic have tanked over the last year, down 44 percent in January from the same period in 2009. That column earned Bercovici an Olbermann blast during his Worst Person in the World segment, in which Olbermann inexplicably called Daily Finance a "right wing site."

Olbermann also countered with some numbers of his own, insisting that his 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. "Countdown" broadcasts were both up in January over December and that his 8 p.m. show still owned a substantial lead over CNN and HLN. Olbermann didn't mention Fox's ratings, probably because the "The O'Reilly Factor" has more than three times his audience among 25-54 year olds.

But it's not all about the numbers. Several commentators have written lately that Olbermann's over-the-top histrionics are getting tiresome - the latest example being his thinly-supported rant about U.S. Senator-elect Scott Brown.

The rant - in which Olbermann branded Brown  "an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman and against politicians with whom he disagrees" - earned Olbermann the Jon Stewart treatment.

Adding insult to injury, Stewart will be bumping up the ratings of Olbermann's Fox rival for the next two nights, making a must-see-TV appearance on O'Reilly.

According to our friends at Fox News, most people aren't buying that whole global-climate-change-thing. But thanks to Glenn Beck, they sure are buying a lot of gold!

AOL Daily Finance's Jeff Bercovicci has the story about Beck ("Thar's gold in them shills!"), who is simultaneously a gold-pushing prophet of doom on Fox News and a pitchman for Goldline International, a major online seller of precious metals. Politico has also done some admirable work on the topic.

Meanwhile, fresh off the announcement of its new "zero tolerance" policy for broadcast errors, Jon Stewart has a new bit on Fox News fudging the facts to apparently push a political agenda, this time on climate change.

It seems Fox News posted the results of a new poll which found that 59 percent of Americans surveyed believe it "somewhat likely" that scientists have fudged climate change data to support global warming theories. Fox also said 35 percent called it "very likely," while 26 percent called it "not very likely."

59% + 35% + 26% = 120%

It seems the actual poll results were that 35 percent of those surveyed said "very likely" while another 24 percent called it "somewhat likely." Why that wasn't significant enough for Fox is anyone's guess, but they apparently added together the 35 percent and the 24 percent into a sort of "at-least-somewhat-likely" category. Then by double-counting the 35 percent "very likely" result, Fox News made it seem like 94 percent of people surveyed believe all those scientists who've devoted their professional lives to climate research are a bunch of charlatans.

And is that so far-fetched, really, after the release of those e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia? I mean, consider the source. When have Russian hackers ever misled us before?

Walter Cronkite is being eulogized live on CBS as I write, but apparently the torch of "most trusted" newscaster has already been passed to ... Jon Stewart?

An unscientific Time magazine web poll has fake-newser Stewart and his "Daily Show" on Comedy Central beating out real anchors Katie Couric (CBS), Brian Williams (NBC), and Charlie Gibson (ABC). Stewart, though, was the only cable anchor in the poll, so we'll never know how the folks at Fox, CNN, and MSNBC would have done by comparison.

It was Jon Stewart vs Jim Cramer in a mano a mano battle over CNBC's pre-meltdown coverage of the financial markets. Stewart won in a walkover.