“Numbers Don’t Lie,” states the headline on Erin R. Brown’s July 18 MRC Culture & Media Institute article purporting to examine the political bias of “The Daily Show.” Actually, they do, and Brown’s article demonstrates it.
Brown writes:
It was contentious and dramatic. On Sunday, June 19, “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace grilled funnyman Jon Stewart on his obvious liberal bias and Stewart replied, “… there is not a designed ideological agenda on my part to affect partisan change …”
The exchange got heated when Stewart held that line, telling Wallace, “You can’t understand, because of the world 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.”
Well, “designed” or not, Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” mocks the right far more than it does the left, and a survey of the 16 broadcasts since the Wallace-Stewart run-in proves it.
CMI found that Stewart went after Republicans and Fox News (which he labels “conservative”) almost four times as often as liberals and Democrats in just three weeks of shows. However the next eight broadcasts proved that Stewart just couldn’t help but show his true, partisan colors.
Note the small, selective sample size — just 16 shows in a particular three-week span. Brown’s cherry-picked sample excludes the shows in the three weeks running up to Stewart’s “Fox News Sunday” — which just happen to feature numerous attacks on former Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner.
Funny how Brown chose not to include those shows in her analysis, isn’t it? You’d think that the MRC was interested more in partisan politics than “media research” or something. But such shoddy “research” is all too emblematic of the MRC’s approach.