The Only Bias Comes From Fox News...

A friend of mine got really excited when Jon Stewart told Fox News to go f*ck themselves, in a monologue that supposedly showed the most popular cable news network's hypocrisy when it comes to generalizing.

The video he sent me came about when I called out the hypocrisy of many of my lefty friends who are scared of the "racism and hatred" they think characterizes all TEA Partiers. I asked one person, who claimed to have witnessed this first hand at a 9/12 protest locally, to explain how he concluded that the smattering of bad behavior he'd seen was a reflection of the protests en toto. His response was that he was "driving by" one and saw two or three signs, such as the infamous Obama witchdoctor poster (which I denounced here,) and therefore concluded that there was so much vile racism around that we should mock and deride everyone protesting the expansion of government. Once I pointed out the obvious stupidity of this smear, the friend didn't want to talk about it anymore.

The Jon Stewart piece begins well enough, poking fun at lefties generalizing about TEA Partiers, but then goes off the rails cherry-picking individual sentences from various programs to point out the supposed hypocrisy of anyone who dislikes the generalizations made by the left about TEA Party supporters.

I love a good generalization, particularly when it stirs up the ire of the left, and so generalizing in general wasn't the point of the argument. Indeed, from my own archives, I can pull out some great and true generalizations about liberals, complete with factual support, but there's a big difference between arguing that conservatives think liberals are misinformed while liberals think conservatives are evil and liberals arguing that TEA Partiers are racists and dangerous.

More to the specific accusation from Jon Stewart, a big lefty in his own right, there are more than a few examples of generalizations made against conservatives with little or no rebuttal than anything said on Fox News. And I don't even have to grab a single sentence to make the point.