Jon Stewart doesn’t play adults well.

The Comedy Central host proved it Monday night when he turned a chance for correcting an error in his own “Daily Show” – an error that fed into the nationwide smear against law enforcement going on in the mainstream media right now — into an attack on Fox News for criticizing the error in the first place.

And his audience – who distressingly seem to get most of what they think is actual news from late-night libs like Stewart and the retiring jerk David Letterman – ate it up.

Two things about this juvenile little drama jump out:

Stewart’s cute turn of a phrase in “media counter-errorism” morphed easily into the left-Democrat habit of equating conservatives with terrorists (“Fox News has to be right only once.”)

The other was that he admitted it was a sham himself. At the 4:25 mark, right after saying “F*** you, Brian, seriously.” He added, “even within the confines of this bit, ostensibly accepting blame for everything that’s coming my way for the factual error I really do regret, f*** you.”

It’s a pretty good bet Stewart knows what “ostensibly” means – most of his audience probably does too. But how many of them noticed he wasn’t really accepting blame at all?

Any news organization makes mistakes, God knows. Any effort that performs in the public eye – a website, a newspaper, a “Daily Show” – is going to screw up, it’s the nature of being human.

When they do, they admit it and move on – because that’s what adults do.

They don’t turn them into attacks on people they disagree with so their audience forgets what the whole mistake was in the first place.

But Jon Stewart doesn’t play adults well. Unfortunately, his fans don’t either.

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Joe Saunders

Joe Saunders, a 25-year newspaper veteran, is a staff writer and editor for BizPac Review who lives in Tallahassee and covers capital and Florida politics. Email Joe at [email protected].

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