Last week was dominated by the expose of Acorn. Every day, a new and more disturbing video of ACORN was released. As a result, ACORN has now become a full-blown political scandal. Last week, Fox was in seventh heaven while the 3 major networks were again made to look irrelevant. The left leaning media was caught in a firestorm and they looked like deer in headlights.
But not Jon Stewart, the biggest gun of the left. Jon Stewart is an open and ardent admirer of President Obama. When President & Mrs. Obama went to New York for an evening a few months ago, Jon Stewart gushed on air about how wonderful they looked.
But, Jon Stewart is also a good journalist and a very smart one. The two are not necessarily the same. He calls himself a “fake” journalist but in reality his show is pure journalism, opinion journalism. He uses humor and a cartoonist’s approach to deliver real opinions and news that networks do not show. For example, we turned to Jon Stewart during the Bush Administration to get real news or at least the real color about the news from Iraq.
Jon Stewart realized the reality of ACORN and the scope of the story. So he expressed the outrage felt by many Americans. This enabled Jon Stewart to get to the middle, to the American center. After all, the center is where the vast majority of Americans are. That is where every smart media talent wants to be.
Jon Stewart asked the question that the majority of network news viewers must have asked themselves.Where were the real reporters on this story? How could they get scooped on a story by “two kids”? Wait, why should we try to summarize Jon Stewart in our lame way when we can simply show you. Watch the clip below.
Bill O’Reilly understands the power of Jon Stewart and he admires Stewart. Bill featured the outrage expressed by Jon Stewart on his show. That was smart. This enabled Bill O’Reilly to show that the ACORN outrage was not just a right wing issue but an issue that had disturbed even liberals like Jon Stewart.
Bill O’Reilly understands that ACORN is a potential problem for him as well. He is reveling in the glory of his cause and the success of Fox. But the danger lies in going too far, getting too happy.
So Bill O’Reilly has moved to the center on this issue. He has excoriated ACORN and gone after the few senators who voted to keep funding for ACORN. But, he has begun expressing real concern about what this scandal can do the Obama Presidency.
This is smart because middle America has to be concerned about the Obama Administration loosing its credibility at such an early stage. America has only one President and we have him until 2012. Having the Presidency damaged in its first year is not good for the country.
This may be one reason why Bill O’Reilly now calls himself an independent. He openly distinguishes himself from his colleagues like Sean Hannity whom he described as Republican. Very smart in our opinion.
In our February 21, 2009 article, we called Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart as mirror images of each other. Mirror images appear as if they are opposites of each other like O’Reilly & Stewart. One is liberal and one is conservative. Even their styles are opposite of each other. The mirror images may look different but the essence remains the same. O’Reilly and Stewart are essentially the same – Highly intelligent, extremely talented with the ability to go where their audience is but true to themselves.
No wonder these two have been at the top of their genre for such a long time.
Editor’s Note: In this article, we put Bill O’Reilly before Jon Stewart because alphabetically B comes before J; O & R come before S. Others may be politically correct, but our passion is to be alphabetically correct. So nothing should be read in the order of their names. We do not choose favorites between mirror images.
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Bill O’Reilly & Jon Stewart – The Two Smartest People in Media?
