Oh, OK. I have no excuses for him. But I do hope you get to watch the entire video to see his experience on TDS. It's quite relevant to the point you raised.
It was raised a while back that people do take TDS' content as factual. Schiff's interview was quoted by other media even. Schiff got death threats afterwards.
Howard Stern had fake Arnold Schwarzenegger on his radio show about 10 years ago (the guy sounds EXACTLY like Arnold and Arnold used to do the show before he became governor) talking about destroying the moon to stop PMS and that California was looking into it. Howard never let anyone in on the fact that it was fake Arnold and callers called in furious about what he was saying. A few news outlets and a political commenter actually took it as a serious thing and wrote/talked about it. People are idiots. And I just don't buy the death threats thing. He probably got a message from some kid on twitter.
Here is the line that Joe Scarborough cited as serious: "If we get rid of the moon, women, those menstrual cycles are governed by the moon, will not get (pre-menstrual syndrome). They will stop b****ing and whining."
Dunno. But I'm guessing this was a relatively isolated incident, with only a very few people getting duped, and the hoax actually getting revealed? I can't say the same for TDS. Watch the video. Look at his FB.
I am not going to watch an hour long video of this whiny ahole when he says something as stupid as "liberals believe in theft" in the first 90 seconds. I will certainly not go to his Facebook page. This guy interests me as much as getting punched in the face.
The joke is that the people who purport to have the moral high ground and vigorously defend "Americanism" don't have the self-awareness to realize their own blustery buffoonery. We laugh because their veil of self-righteousness is exposed when compared to real virtues. There is a constant ethic behind every contrast these two shows make : fairness, tolerance, individuality, cooperation, basically the morals we are taught in Kindergarten. It's a satisfying sanity affirmation in an insane world for some of us. The fake show has real virtues and American politics has fake virtues. (I listed 10 or so hypocrisies a few pages back)
But here they are using deception and lies to advance that ethic. Mocking people for saying things they didn't say.
It's pretty consistent over the 1000 episodes I've seen. But you know, writers and producers come and go, they are driven to make mark, sure there are mistakes. I didn't watch the video, it could be 100% valid in this case, but it's not an indictment for the show as a whole or the progressive humanist ethic.
Howard Stern had a Mitt Romney impersonator on frequently during the last presidential election cycle. I can't remember the guy's name, but he sounded EXACTLY like Govenor Romney. Every show he did for Howard was hilarious, I thought. Also has a President Obama impersonator call in from time to time. Another dead-ringer (voice-wise). Another hilarious bit. Howard Stern is pretty obvious about his bits being satire or just plain outlandish. He often pokes fun at people for not having common sense and basic knowledge about a lot of things. I don't know if Stern is "left-leaning" himself (although he routinely gives his producer―a pro-Republican, trickle-down ideologue―an awful time of it whenever the dialog moves in that direction), but he is often quite observant of the distance people have between their facts and their perceptions.
I loved the Mitt impersonator. That guy was hilarious. His racist rant the day after the election was classic. The Obama impersonator had a fantastic line. Something like "I want to build a bridge to the future, one big enough so everyone can sleep under it or jump off it." Howard is definitely left leaning but he's not afraid to vote for Republicans he likes. Howard hasn't really tried to fool the audience since he went to Sirius (just George Takei). He used to have Evil Dave Letterman (a guy who just sounds like Dave Letterman, exactly, but is not an impersonator, and has an IQ of about 90) all the time without mentioning it was 'evil' Dave. Letterman didn't like that and his producer called in about it. Moral of the story...Howard is 100x more entertaining than the guy in the OP.
So I started watching the video, I made it about a minute before Schiff says "you know, liberals believe in theft", so I immediately assumed this guy is a disingenuous clown that pollutes the air waves with outrageous crap and he needs to be crushed. But you know, he's just a small part of the skit, it's is his actual statements on film. I guess he's embarrassed Samantha Bee didn't fall for his aura. The 2009 interview where he shills his book makes him look pretty good, except for the fact that we still haven't had his predicted hyperinflation 5 years later.
My statement was more geared towards those who view them as their only source of media. Which is millions of twenty and thirty somethings. Sure, they watch it for the comedic factor, but they also easily accept the fact that these guys are doing a grand service to the country - when they aren't. The problem is, a lot of their viewers aren't smart enough - or too dense to realize that it is all for comedic effect.
That's not a problem unique to Comedy Central. There are tens of millions of people that listen to Beck or Limbaugh or Levin or watch FOX News all day. The difference is TDS IS comedy, intended to be comedy, by a comedian on a comedy network and the others are con artists, shock jocks, and entertainers pretending to cover real news.
Funny because I also explained how your posts are pseudo-intellectual a page back. I don't know if you watched the entire video or, just like BabaBooey, you turned it off at that point, but he's upset at how his interview was edited. I thought you people got this? This is what we've been debating about from the beginning. I make no excuses if he got anything wrong. FYI, he got the 2008 crash right. But the topic of our discussion is TDS.