Jon Stewart Destroys Fox News’s Coverage of the Tsarnaevs
As soon as authorities confirmed that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was not immediately read his Miranda rights, debate has emerged weighing whether the threat of more attacks merited the national security exemption from the Constitutional requirement that suspects learn their “right to remain silent,” etc.
One place where that reasonable debate went to die was Fox News, a network that has greeted legal debates surrounding the marathon bombing with no small amount of glee. (Nothing brings in the cantankerous viewers like a good-old fashioned debate about whether we should bar Muslims from our nation’s shores!)
As always, Jon Stewart and staff have spent the week closely monitoring Fox (God help them) and the many, many words uttered there simply to fill the hours of the day. The results are grim. “I really worry if we have lost an understanding of our Constitution,” he shows Sean Hannity saying at the start of Thursday’s episode, before showing footage of the various Fox anchors and personalities systematically suggesting we overlook nearly every single amendment in the Bill of Rights. Stewart, being a comedian, paints in broad strokes himself a couple times, but there’s not much room for argument when he shows Ann Coulter suggesting of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife that “I don’t care if she knew about this. She ought to be in prison for wearing a hijab.” (“AND DOWN GOES THE NINTH AMENDMENT!” cheers Stewart from the sideline.) God, you can just picture Coulter sitting in the Fox green room writing that line for herself thinking, “This’ll really get them. Ohoho yes.”
Anyway, Stewart has often been a hilarious voice of reason in the weeks since the bombing, but this segment is particularly worth a view. Have a look:
