Jon Stewart lets Bill O'Reilly off the hook on exaggerated war heroics

Jon Stewart isn&#039;t impressed with the Bill O&#039;Reilly scandal

(Image credit: The Daily Show)

last updated 25 February 2015

On Tuesday night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart waded in to the controversy over his frenemy Bill O'Reilly's apparently exaggerated war stories. Perhaps surprisingly, he's not impressed. "Really!?!" he said. "We're going after O'Reilly for exaggerating being in a war zone? I don't know if you watch his program," with its "No-Spin Zone," Stewart added, but "misrepresenting the zone he's in is kind of his hook." And his network is Fox News, he noted, whose "Fair & Balanced" slogan is "a textbook case of trolling."

After mocking Mother Jones, which raised the questions about O'Reilly's Falkland War stories, Stewart got to his larger point: "Look, why don't we just agree that a good amount of the personal anecdotes from our media figures are seasoned with bullshit, and let's just move on?" Stewart raised, then shrugged off, Veteran Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald's claim that he served in Special Forces, and proposed that "world outrage supplies are finite," and if we waste them on inconsequential status embellishments, "our anger tanks could be empty when we need them most." And his final salvo, aimed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, does seem more relevant than a 33-year-old war between Britain and Argentina. —Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.