Comedy Channeling C-SPAN

By Published On: April 14, 2010

Open letter to Jon Stewart, host and executive producer of the Daily Show on Comedy Central (Monday through Thursday, 11:00 PM ET).

Dear Mr. Stewart:

Your popular Daily Show often tackles current news items with clever, caustic humor. In this vein, a March 31, 2010 Daily Show broadcast segment humorously and appropriately lampooned a C-SPAN host‘s feckless handling of a casually racist anti-black caller in a March 29 C-SPAN Washington Journal broadcast. However, this host merely typifies all (or nearly all) of the C-SPAN Journal hosts in their handling of a particular class of bigoted rants by sitting mutely, shuffling papers, and then thanking the callers for their input. These rants, contained in hundreds of calls aired by C-SPAN, are readily available to be mined for humorous fulmination. The documentation is concisely presented on CAMERA’s Website, camera.org, in the following articles (several of the calls documented include video clips): C-SPAN Watch, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal a Platform for Anti-Semitism, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Caller Problem, and – C-SPAN President’s CAMERA Shy Reaction (with video clip) in which a rare Israel related call not bashing Israel, is humorously mishandled by C-SPAN’s president, acting as Journal host, reacting tongue-tied and speechless to a caller’s news that the historical record shows that Arab anti-Jewish terrorism had preceded Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

These CAMERA articles describe hundreds of Journal calls containing virulent anti-Jewish, anti-Israel rants handled in a feckless or foolish way by the host and (often) the guest.

We trust that you will utilize the Journal broadcast material from CAMERA (or at least make use of the CAMERA material in searching C-SPAN archives) for use in the Daily Show since you aim (or should aim) to be an equal-opportunity satirist.

Sincerely,

CAMERA

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