During the Daily Show‘s Monday episode, Jon Stewart criticized both left and right media for playing the blame game in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting.
The host opened his monologue by pointing out the “six mass shootings in 24 hours,” including the tragic shooting at a Michigan Mormon church. Stewart said that while in the past “the routine would be we express our shock, we express our sadness, we offer thoughts and prayers, we spend a day, maybe two arguing about the appropriateness of bringing up guns at all, and then we do nothing until the next time,” today’s polarizing politics have replaced that “cycle of helplessness” with a “new post shooting pastime, which he called, “Was this one of yours?”
Stewart then rolled clips from MSNBC to Fox News pointing fingers at the political opposition while making claims such as “the guy is a right-wing, Trump-supporting evangelical Christian” to “He is a Biden supporter. Case closed.”
“It’s America’s new gender reveal tradition,” joked Stewart, later adding, “I miss the good old days of mass shootings, when networks took a principled stance to not shower attention on acts designed to get attention.”
The host attributed the media’s obsession with “right-left framing of violence” partly to its attempt to keep up with social media, which he said “is doing it crazier and faster than anybody else.” However, Stewart was quick to point out, “Here’s the thing: Who the fuck cares?”
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“These mass shootings don’t fit neatly into our left-right paradigm,” he continued. “Mass shootings are probably caused by a complex fusion of mental health and access to weapons and attention-seeking, delusional nihilism married to an algorithmic underworld that sets these horrific acts in motion. But unfortunately, right-left paradigm is the only way our narcissistic media ecosystem sees anything anymore.”
Watch Stewart’s full Daily Show monologue below.