Jon Stewart Has Beef With Coverage of Trump Trial

The media may think it's learned from its outsized coverage of Donald Trump, but nope, not according to Jon Stewart, who spent Monday's Daily Show blasting coverage of the former president's hush money trial in New York. "It's a trial. It's boring, mostly," Stewart said. But media outlets didn't see it that way, with pundits claiming it to be "the trial of the century," showing the "walls closing in" on Trump. "Yes, this time, Mr. Bond, it truly is your doom," Stewart mocked analysts. "Perhaps if we limit the coverage to the issues at hand and try not to create an all-encompassing spectacle of the most banal of details, perhaps that would help," he went on, per the New York Times, before airing media footage of Trump's motorcade.

"Seriously, are we going to follow this guy to court every f---ing day? Are you trying to make this OJ? It's not a chase. He's commuting," Stewart quipped. He then continued in this vein, airing pundits' analyses of courtroom sketches and play-by-plays of Trump's actions in court, mostly limited to glances and the pursing of lips. "What the f--- are we doing?" Stewart asked at one point, per the Hollywood Reporter. He said the trial was "a test of the media's ability to cover Donald Trump in a responsible way" and "the media's first attempt, the very first attempt, on the first day, of self control, failed," which doesn't bode well for the future.

"At some point in this trial something important and revelatory is going to happen, but none of us are going to notice because the hours spent on his speculative, facial tics," Stewart said. "If the media tries to make us feel like the most mundane bullshit is Earth shattering, we won't believe you when it's really interesting. It's your classic boy who cried Wolf Blitzer." And this is just "the first day of the first of his 438 trials to come," Stewart continued. "Pace yourselves," he told journalists. "And if you're bored you can always start planning how you're going to fuck up covering his next trial and the sober mea culpa you'll deliver during his next term as president." (More Jon Stewart stories.)