I want to take a brief detour from New York Times Fall Fashion Supplement Week (which, let’s be honest, was running out of steam anyway) to highlight this video of Jon Stewart making a total fool of Chris Matthews. It’s pretty amazing to see Mattthews’ glibness, which is almost sublime in its imperturbability, punctured so deftly, though it gets so bad that I almost felt sorry for Matthews, who had no reason to expect that Stewart was going to treat his book any differently than any other interviewer had ever done–as a disposable commodity that’s not actually intended to communicate anything other than Chris Matthews’ desire to be talked about and watched on television.
I admire Stewart for his willingness, here, to violate the unspoken compact which usually governs these interviews between fellow TV personalities — they’re congenial because both interviewer and interviewee work for the same entertainment-industrial complex, because the interviewee can scratch the interviewer’s back when the shoe’s on the other foot (mixed metaphor alert!), and because people prefer to be nice to each other.
There’s no question, though, that Stewart totally sandbagged Matthews, in a pretty unfair way, and that there was something deeply disingenuous about the way that he kept acting as if it was all in good fun. If he wants to be that kind of interviewer — the kind who actually calls people out for writing stupid, narcissistic, morally corrupt books — then bravo to him, but the way to do it (the manly way to do it, if you will), is to be straightforward about the fact that you’re about to subject your guest to some pretty brutal questioning.
That said, shame on the rest of news media for being so lame that it’s left to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to call these idiots out on their idiocy.
