The Empire 237

'Transcript: Bill Moyers Talks With Jon Stewart
Bill Moyers Journal

I'm Bill Moyers. Welcome. Every week at this time we'll be holding a kaleidoscope up to the light and turning it to see ideas and events through different perspectives.
I've been a journalist since I was 16 years old, with a detour here and there, and it's just as exciting as ever to catch a gust of news and ride it to some fresh insight and understanding. But events come faster than ever and the news from many more places - YouTube, the web, satellite radio ... Ipods. So a weekly journal will reflect a variety of sources.
For example, I start my day with Josh Marshall and end it with Jon Stewart. One's a journalist, the other says he is just a comic-but I think he's really kidding:
CLIPS FROM THE DAILY SHOW:
Coming up on the Journal: Jon Stewart of THE DAILY SHOW and Josh Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com.
Bill Moyers: Thank you for being with me, Jon Stewart.
Jon Stewart: My absolute pleasure. Welcome back, very excited to see you back on the television.
Bill Moyers: I'm glad to be here, but you know I'm here only because I applied for a job as correspondent on THE DAILY SHOW and you turned me down.
Jon Stewart: We have standards. Anybody with the kind of journalism experience and professionalism that you have displayed over these years can not work for my program.
Bill Moyers: You've said many times, "I don't want to be a journalist, I'm not a journalist."
Jon Stewart: And we're not.
Bill Moyers: But you're acting like one. You've assumed that role. The young people that work with me now, think they get better journalism from you than they do from the Sunday morning talk shows.
Jon Stewart: I can assure them they're not getting any journalism from us. We are, if anything - I do believe we function as a sort of editorial cartoon. That we are a digestive process, like so many other digestive processes that go on. The thing about you know, there's a lot of young people get this and you know, young people get that from me. People are very sophisticated consumers of information, and they're pulling all different things.
It's the same argument people say about the blogs. The blogs are responsible. No, they're not. The blogs are like anything else. You judge each one based on its own veracity and intelligence and all of that. And if you like, you could cherry pick only the things that you agree with from various things. Or, if you want, you can try and get a broader perspective, or you can find people who are absolutely out of their minds, or find people that are doing incredibly complex and interesting and urgent journalism. And the same goes for our show. It's a prism into people's own ideologies, when they watch our program. This is just our take.
Bill Moyers: But it isn't just you, sometimes you'll start a riff, you'll start down the path of a joke, and it's about Bush or about Cheney, and the audience will get it. Your live audience will get it, they'll start applauding even before they know the punch line. And I'm thinking, "Okay, they get it. That's half the country." What about the other half of the country, are they paying attention? They don't care they don't they would they wouldn't listen to the joke, if they did, they wouldn't get it?
Jon Stewart: Well, I do you think that sense of humor goes as far as our ideology. I think that ultimately, we have we have very interesting reactions on our show. People are constantly saying, "I love your-your show is so funny, until you made a joke about global warming, which is a serious issue, and I can't believe you did that. And I am never watching your show again." You know, people don't understand that we're not warriors in their cause. We're a group of people that really feel that they want to write jokes about the absurdity that we see in government and the world and all that, and that's it.'

Zie: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050107C.shtml