Last night, Jon Stewart destroyed Rupert Murdoch’s claim that all Muslims should be held responsible for terrorism. Even better, Stewart did it with Murdoch’s own refusal to be held responsible for phone hacking at his newspapers.
In case you missed it, Murdoch tweeted over the weekend, “Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.” Predictably, this engendered quite a bit of blowback, including a great response from Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. Even better was the #RupertsFault twitter hashtag created by Aziz Ansari. It included such gems as “@rupertmurdoch is Christian just like Mark David Chapman who shot John Lennon. Why didn’t Rupert stop it? #RupertsFault” and “@azizansari Hitler was raised Catholic. Holocaust = #RupertsFault”
But I think The Daily Show topped them all. Stewart demolished Murdoch’s credibility with a clip of him being asked, during a hearing into the phone hacking at his London tabloids, if he was responsible for “this whole fiasco.”
“No,” Murdoch said unequivocally.” He said the people who were responsible were “the people that I trusted to run it and then maybe the people they trusted.”
Stewart followed that with a series of clips from Fox News and Fox Business talking heads more or less echoing Murdoch’s tweet.
Driving home the meme was a panel of “condemnologists” featuring some of our favorite Daily Show correspondents.
A great comeback!
Watch it below, from last night’s The Daily Show.