Fox News Strikes Back Against Jon Stewart – Video

Chris Wallace defended his interview with Jon Stewart--and denied that it was edited out of context.
The interview on "Fox News Sunday" caused a huge ruckus, and Stewart spent two days talking about it on his own show. Most notably, he claimed that Fox News, in editing his 24-minute appearance down to a 14-minute segment, had made him look emotionally unstable and had taken out key portions of the interview.
Speaking to Don Imus on his Thursday radio show, Wallace said that he thought the conversation had gone well.
"He scored some points, I scored some points," he said. He added that Stewart was "somewhat in denial about the bias of his program and more importantly of the mainstream media, and I also think he lives in denial about his ambitions."
Imus asked about Stewart's charge that the segment was edited to make him look bad. "I think if he looked bad it was his fault," Wallace said, chuckling. "The reason that anybody has seen the full version is because we put it out. We weren't hiding anything ... quite frankly, Jon was filibustering ... and we had to cut it down."
The two also agreed about Stewart's mockery of Herman Cain. (Cain harshly criticized Stewart, saying that he was being mocked because he is a black conservative.
"Name one other white performer who could get away with that," Imus said.

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Jon Stewart LIVE On Fox News - Video

Early in the interview, Wallace flashed a previous quote of Stewart's calling Fox News a "relentless agenda-driven 24 hour news opinion propaganda delivery system," and asked Stewart, "Where do you come up with this stuff?"
Stewart responded, "Uh, it's actually quite easy."
Later, when Wallace argued that a clip about Sarah Palin from the Daily Show was political commentary, Stewart told Wallace, "You're insane... Here's the difference between you and I. I'm a comedian first. My comedy is informed by an ideological background, there's no question about that. But the thing that you will never understand...is that Hollywood, yeah, they're liberal, but that's not their primary motivating force. I'm not an activist. I am a comedian."
"Do I want my voice heard?" Stewart continued later. "Absolutely, that's why I got into comedy. Am I an activist, in your mind? A partisan ideological activist?" Wallace responded, "Yeah." "Okay, then I disagree with you," Stewart said. "You can't understand, because of the world that you live in, that there is not a designed ideological agenda on my part to affect partisan change because that's the soup you swim in. And I appreciate that, I understand it. It reminds me of in ideological regimes, they can't understand that there is free media other places because they receive marching orders."
However, it was in a later exchange that Stewart got actually angry at Wallace, as he talked about what he called the misinformation that Fox News gave its viewers.
"The embarrassment is that I'm given credibility in this world because of the disappointment that the public has in what the news media does," he said.
"I don't think our viewers are the least bit disappointed with us," Wallace said. "I think our viewers think, finally, they're getting somebody who tells the other side of the story."

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