Jon Stewart, 'Populist Avenging Angel'?

The Washington Post signaled its liberalism by putting Jon Stewart’s bullying interview with Jim Cramer on the front page Saturday under the headline "Stewart’s Time to Channel Our Anger." (Who is "our"? He certainly isn’t channeling conservative anger.) Howard Kurtz totally dropped any pretense of objectivity and obsequiously painted Stewart in glittery gold:

Jon Stewart has amassed a passionate following over the years as a sharp-edged satirist, the man who punctures the balloons of the powerful with a caustic candor that reporters cannot muster...Stewart morphed into a populist avenging angel this week, demanding to know why CNBC and its most manic personality, Jim Cramer, failed to warn the public about the risky Wall Street conduct that triggered the financial crisis.

Kurtz, who has drawn some liberal arrows over the years for his willingness to admit liberal tilt when it’s incredibly obvious (like Obama’s coverage in the 2008 campaign), failed in this story to consider that Stewart wasn’t an "avenging angel" for populists, but a transparent shill for liberal Obama-lovers. He also failed to consider that this same Jon Stewart took his mockery to the other side of the fence, mocking "doom and gloom" reporting on the economy last May and calling CNN's Ali Velshi the "hairless prophet of doom."

Stewart hasn’t "punctured the balloons of the powerful" when he’s interviewed John Kerry or Bill Clinton on his set. In those interviews, he wasn’t so much an avenging angel as he was a humble and lovable shoeshine boy. This should make it a little ridiculous for Jon to claim journalists are passive swallowers of empty talking points, while he is the righteous comedian-angel flying around the heavens with a sword.

The Kurtz article also concluded in a pretentious fashion that reaction fell along partisan lines – as if the Post story and front-page placement, with Stewart playing the role of Avenging Angel – wasn’t prancing along partisan lines:

Online reaction tended to split along partisan lines. National Review's Mark Hemingway wrote that "Cramer's appearance on the show . . . was nothing short of a predictable sandbagging, with Stewart hopped up on faux indignation." But James Moore said on the Huffington Post that Stewart "has brought back context to journalism by making people in our drive-by culture responsible for their words and even actions."

Hemingway's appearance in the last paragraph was the only place where the Post would consider the conservative view that Stewart is an arrogant left-wing poseur.