Culture

Jon Stewart Exposes Fox News' Hypocrisy over Benghazi

Last week, new documents from the White House revealed that the Obama administration did in fact seek to alter talking points on Benghazi when officials discussed the tragedy on television. As with any new Benghazi development, you can bet that Fox News was all over it. 

By Ben Cosman
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Last week, new documents from the White House revealed that the Obama administration did in fact seek to alter talking points on Benghazi when officials discussed the tragedy on television. As with any new Benghazi development, you can bet that Fox News was all over it.

On The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart went through Fox News' "outrage" over the "smoking gun" that is these new emails from White House officials. And, to an extent, this is an issue for the Obama administration. Stewart explained what these documents mean: "The White House had politics and elections on their mind when they sent Susan Rice to the Sunday shows. It's deplorable. I'm not sure what it means in terms of fixing the initial problems of inadequate communication and protection that caused the tragedy, but OK. Good find, moving on."

Ah, sorry Jon, but Fox News is certainly not going to move on. The network harped on this "conspiracy" to "change the story" all week, demanding to know why other news networks refuse to cover it, and lamenting that the public doesn't seem to care.

"You think people's failure to match your level of outrage is based on ignorance," Stewart said. "That after nearly 100 network news stories, hundreds of cable news stories about Benghazi, 13 Congressional hearings, 50 further Congressional briefings, and 25,000 pages of official findings concerning what happened in Benghazi, that if we all only knew about it, we would care." Right.

Rather, the reason no one can match Fox News' outrage is that we've seen this sort of thing before. You want to talk about an intelligence failure leading to the tragedy of American's losing their lives? As Stewart pointed out, there's a little something called the Iraq War.

"I commend you for finally getting in touch with your inner outrage. Because if I remember correctly, in the previous decade it was an emotion you did not seem comfortable addressing or expressing," Stewart said.

Here, let Stewart show you exactly how Fox News covered the Bush Administration's intelligence screw-ups:

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.