Five months after Jon Stewart returned to host \u201cThe Daily Show,\u201d he has reunited with an old foe: former Fox host and commentator Bill O\u2019Reilly.<\/p>\n
\u201cStewart and I have a history, all right? We go back,\u201d O\u2019Reilly said on Tuesday night\u2019s episode, to laughs in the audience.<\/p>\n
A lot has changed since the early 2010s, when the two men regularly sparred on late-night shows, and not just in the political arena: Stewart, who once said that giving O\u2019Reilly a platform was probably \u201cThe Daily Show\u2019s\u201d \u201cworst legacy,\u201d left the show in 2015. Fox ousted O\u2019Reilly two years later amid a series of sexual harassment complaints against him, which he described as \u201ccompletely unfounded.\u201d<\/p>\n
Several people online criticized Stewart\u2019s decision to host O\u2019Reilly on the show. Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, who in 2016 sued Fox News CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment, called the decision \u201cunbelievably outrageous \u2026 The fact that O\u2019Reilly is back to having a platform promulgates the idea that bad men get comebacks and courageous women continue to be penalized.\u201d Journalist Yashar Ali wrote that there was \u201cno reason to give [O\u2019Reilly] a platform\u201d unless he was asked about the allegations against him.<\/p>\n
On the Tuesday evening show, which made no mention of the allegations, O\u2019Reilly said that he and Stewart \u201care able to disagree without hating each other,\u201d before joking: \u201cNow, I truly hate him, but I don\u2019t \u2014 I don\u2019t show it.\u201d Stewart responded: \u201cYou hold it very well.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the agenda of Tuesday night\u2019s show was the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump at a campaign rally on Saturday and political polarization in the United States. The show was originally scheduled to broadcast from Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention is taking place this week, but returned to its New York studio after the shooting, \u201cThe Daily Show\u201d said. Stewart said Tuesday night that the stepped-up security at the convention made it more difficult to host live audiences.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Reilly criticized \u201cThe View\u201d for leading its coverage with the fact that the shooter at Trump\u2019s campaign rally was a registered Republican.<\/p>\n
\u201cLook, you and I are both somewhat fossilized practitioners of the rhetorical arts that are confrontational at times, provocative at times,\u201d responded Stewart. \u201cAnd we made a really spectacular living pushing those envelopes. It seems now to say, hey, these other people should stop \u2026 Shouldn\u2019t the argument be, we have to start arguing with each other in good faith?\u201d<\/p>\n
O\u2019Reilly defended criticism and \u201crobust debate\u201d in politics, but said that the \u201cdifference\u201d was that \u201cfanatics on the left and the right want to see their opposition destroyed, they want to hurt them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stewart said he did not disagree with O\u2019Reilly\u2019s comments but argued that \u201cthere is a feeling [on the right] that they haven\u2019t been doing that and that it is the purview of the left.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHow can we have a conversation about rhetoric if we can\u2019t even agree \u2014 if there are delusions of \u2018it\u2019s really only them?\u2019\u201d Stewart added.<\/p>\n
Throughout the segment, the two also exchanged jibes, including when O\u2019Reilly mentioned his \u201cjob as a journalist,\u201d to which Stewart replied: \u201cOh, when did you get that job?\u201d<\/p>\n
They also debated the presidential records of President Biden and Trump, with O\u2019Reilly listing economic and social issues that he blamed on Biden, while Stewart blamed Trump for a large deficit and high spending on tax cuts. Stewart also mocked O\u2019Reilly\u2019s suggestion that Trump\u2019s actions during the Jan. 6 insurrection \u201chave haunted him every day since,\u201d and disagreed with O\u2019Reilly\u2019s suggestion that Trump would otherwise have had a significant lead in the polls.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Reilly and Stewart have frequently faced off over the years: notably, in 2014, they debated the issue of white privilege after the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old Black man, by a White police officer.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Five months after Jon Stewart returned to host \u201cThe Daily Show,\u201d he has reunited with an old foe: former Fox host and commentator Bill O\u2019Reilly. \u201cStewart and I have a history, all right? We go back,\u201d O\u2019Reilly said on Tuesday night\u2019s episode, to laughs in the audience. A lot has changed since the early 2010s, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6197,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6196\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}