Stewart on Tapper: Say, Remember When Reporters Actually Reported News When They Found It?

Hey, I’m so old that I remember when reporters used to actually look for news in the first place, even apart from publication timing. But to Jon Stewart’s point, having a TV news program every weekday on prime time would suggest that “bombshells” should have presented a little sooner to the American public than at the end of a book publisher’s cycle. Or as Patricia Heaton put it on X, via John Nolte at Breitbart, “Can you imagine Walter Cronkite constantly hawking a book?” 

Stewart cuts to the point almost immediately in his monologue last night:

.@jonstewart is getting whiplash watching CNN pivot from promoting Jake Tapper’s “bombshell” book to lamenting Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis pic.twitter.com/pShybi5F6e

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 20, 2025

After ridiculing Tapper and CNN for selling in book form breaking news that respectable journalists used to report when that news was actually breaking (and not for $27.00 a week from now), it’s at the seven-minute mark where Stewart lays bare everything sleazy about all this in a single sentence…

“…how [expletive] weird it is that the news is selling you a book about news they should’ve told you was news a year ago … for free.”

The entire monologue is worth watching, but this point may be the most pertinent. Book publication cycles generally take several months from draft to hitting the bookstores. My book (Going Red) took around six months, a very frustrating delay that is nonetheless built into the industry for understandable reasons. My book didn’t promise breaking news; it was a more analytical approach to the lessons of the 2012 cycle for the GOP, and in general anyone who puts a campaign together. The publisher of Original Sin might have accelerated that cycle somewhat, but it still would have been a few months between draft and product ready to ship. 

The book raises an ethical question that Stewart adeptly puts in stark relief: why didn’t CNN report these “bombshells” when its top political reporter discovered them? CNN isn’t available for “free,” after all; its viewers pay for that access in some way through cable subscriptions or direct accounts with Warner/Discovery. If the information in the book is news, why didn’t CNN cover it as news when it became known?

And that, of course, is separate from the point that CNN and other media outlets spent years not reporting on Joe Biden’s cognitive incompetence. Despite clear and public evidence manifesting nearly every time Biden appeared and spoke, CNN didn’t bother to ask the questions that Tapper asked for his book research. In fact, CNN — Tapper included — actively criticized those who did raise the issue of Biden’s cognitive health, happily parroting the White House line about Sharp As A Tack® and Runs Rings Around Aides Half His Age, while watching Biden get lost repeatedly on stages and having the Easter Bunny Intervention. 

But in that same sense … where was Jon Stewart during the same period of time? By February 2024, Stewart began to gently poke at Biden’s age, Ed Driscoll reminds us, which means Stewart did better than all of his late-night comic competitors save Bill Maher. (Even that got him a sharp backlash from progressives.) But as Christian Toto reminds us, Stewart never bothered to do much more until the debate made Biden’s incapacity too obvious to pretend otherwise:

Legacy Media collectively lied to the American public. So did Democrat after Democrat after Democrat. And millions took them at their word.

Imagine if the GOP did the same thing. Would Stewart respond with a shrug as he did last night?

The shocking cover-up is perfect fodder for a truth-telling satirist like Stewart. Yet he mostly avoided the subject over the past year-plus and hasn’t targeted those who propagated one of the biggest political lies in modern history.

Until now.

This week, Biden’s decline is on everyone’s lips – as is the tragic news of his prostate cancer.

Why now? It’s Clean-Up on Aisle 4 … there’s a mid-term election next year, and this must be dealt with and put back under the rug.

The Easter Bunny Intervention took place in April 2022. It took nearly two years after that for Stewart to offer a lame joke about Biden looking old on TikTok.

So in a sense, while Stewart’s rant is a welcome focus on the Protection Racket Media hypocrisy, it’s also a useful reminder that the Daily Show and other late-night comics were just as much a part of that same hypocrisy. And that includes Stewart.