Jon Stewart admitted he made a mistake while reporting on police shootings of unarmed black men, and then lashed out at Fox News for criticizing the “one factual error that in no way changed the preponderance of the evidence in the piece,” instead of discussing police brutality.
“We were wrong in a list of unarmed black men shot by police should not have Dante Parker, who according to the county medical examiner, died of a PCP overdose,” Stewart confessed on Monday. “I’m sorry about that, we shouldn’t have done that.”
“I hate making unforced errors like this. Here’s why it makes me so angry,” Stewart continued. “Now, rather than having the uncomfortable conversation about a judicial system maybe biased or a disturbing pattern of unarmed black men being shot by police, or a certain element of militarization and force that has crept into some aspects of law enforcement culture, my stupidity, my sloppiness — I did this to me — can become an opportunity to negate that entire conversation.”
Cut to clips of Fox News anchors telling their viewers Stewart “uses his show to slam the cops,” and that “facts don’t matter” to him — both of which he took in stride after recognizing he set himself up to be targeted by the people he regularly takes to task for their own factual errors.
“See, that’s what’s so tough about working in media counter errorism,” Stewart said. “‘The Daily Show’ has to be right 100 percent of the time, Fox only has to be right once.”
Stewart stopped grinning, however, after playing a clip of Fox News anchor Brian Kilmeade bringing up 85 police officers being killed in New York City after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“F–k you, Brian. Seriously. F–k you,” Stewart said. “By the way jackass, you can truly grieve for every officer who has been lost in the line of duty in this country and still be troubled by cases of police overreach. Those two ideas are not mutually exclusive. You can have great regard for law enforcement and still want them to be held to high standards.”