The endless summer media feud: Jon Stewart v. Chris Wallace

Like it or not, the media feud of the summer is officially here: Jon Stewart versus Chris Wallace.

A week after the "Daily Show" host made a contentious appearance on "Fox News Sunday"--one that became so heated it was subsequently fact-checked by a third party--he and Wallace, who grilled him on the Sunday chat show, are still prosecuting a full-scale war of words. And because Wallace hosts a weekly show, the spat could, conceivably, drag on through the dog days of August--or, at least, until a sexier media feud can be manufactured.

Last week on "The Daily Show," Stewart apologized for stating on Wallace's show that Fox News viewers were found to be "the most consistently misinformed" in "every poll"--and then proceeded to fact-check Politifact's own debunking of Stewart's claim with a "21 Lie Salute" of facts about Fox News.

On this past Sunday's Fox News broadcast, meanwhile, Wallace told viewers he would be "setting the record straight about our interview with Jon Stewart," explaining that when he asserted that Fox News tells the "other side" of the story as a "counterweight" to the "liberal" media agenda presented by NBC News and others, he meant to say "the full story."

On Monday's "Daily Show," Stewart countered. "Wait, that's you setting the record straight?" he said. "'I accidentally told the truth and wish I could take it back?' That's crazy."
After showing a clip of Wallace's example of telling the "full story"--Fox News' criticism of the local government in New Orleans' poor response to Katrina, when the rest of the media was piling on FEMA and the Bush administration--Stewart went into full manic mode, pulling out binders of his faux notes on Fox News to find a better example.

Stewart soon alighted on one sinister-sounding case in point: a Fox News host suggesting an ATF program under Obama that allowed Mexican drug cartels to purchase weapons in America and smuggle them back into Mexico was either "a mistake" or ""allowed to happen to justify tougher gun laws in the U.S."

"You see that?" Stewart said. "President Obama is either incompetent, or the architect of an evil conspiracy to wreak violent carnage in Mexico as a way to take away Americans guns. You know, both sides of the story."

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