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Late-night comedian Jon Stewart blasted right- and left-leaning news hosts in the “narcissistic media ecosystem” for politicizing recent mass shootings by rushing to blame the other side.
“Who the f–k cares?” Stewart exclaimed Monday during “The Daily Show.” “These mass shootings do not fit neatly into our left-right paradigm.”
“But unfortunately, left-right paradigm is the only way our narcissistic media ecosystem sees anything anymore. That’s the system they built, so it must fit into the right-left paradigm, because that binary is the foundation of all of their programming.”
During his fiery monologue, Stewart slammed cable news pundits for trying to pin the violence on one another after a deadly spurt of six mass shootings in just a 24-hour span over the weekend.
“There’s a mass shooting now like every couple of hours. Previously, the routine would be we express our shock; we express our sadness; we offer our thoughts and prayers; we spend a day, maybe two, arguing about the appropriateness of bringing up guns at all; and then we do nothing until the next time,” Stewart said.
“But as our politics becomes more polarized, even that learned cycle of helplessness has been replaced by a new, post-shooting pastime. That new pastime is, ‘Was this one of yours?’”
Fellow late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel was yanked off-air earlier this month after he said right-wingers were politicizing Charlie Kirk’s assassination – and falsely implied that the killer might have been a MAGA conservative.
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said during his monologue after the 31-year-old conservative activist was fatally shot at a university event in Utah.
His show, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” has since been reinstated by ABC and affiliate station owners Nexstar and Sinclair.
Stewart played a compilation of news hosts and commentators from lefty cable news channels like MSNBC to right-leaning ones like Fox News and Newsmax – all of whom rushed to paint the suspected shooters as political foes.
“It’s America’s new gender reveal tradition!” Stewart said. “The game is so ubiquitous, now we often play it before we even know who the perpetrator is.”
“Now call me old-fashioned, but I miss the good old days of mass shootings when networks took a principled stance to not shower attention on acts designed to get attention,” he added.
The late-night host argued that news hosts are desperately trying to keep up with social media, where users are quick to hop on mass shootings with accusations of political motivation.
He nodded to an attack on a Michigan Latter-day Saints church on Sunday, when a man rammed his truck into the building, opened fire and set the church ablaze – killing four people and wounding several others.
The suspect, Thomas Jacob Sanford, a 40-year-old Iraq War veteran who served in the US Marines, was killed in a shootout with cops at the scene.
“The fire in the church in Michigan was still burning when online influencers were inferring that the number of Muslims in Michigan are what obviously made this attack happen…until police released the suspect’s photo, which looked like it came from a Duck Dynasty fan-fic account, and then the left got to celebrate,” Stewart said.
“And then they found a Trump-Vance sign on his house. Case closed. Except, that sign was placed near a stop sign, so some on the right said, ‘No, no, no. He’s saying stop Trump-Vance.’”
