Five months after Jon Stewart returned to host “The Daily Show,” he has reunited with an old foe: former Fox host and commentator Bill O’Reilly.
“Stewart and I have a history, all right? We go back,” O’Reilly said on Tuesday night’s episode, to laughs in the audience.
A lot has changed since the early 2010s, when the two men regularly sparred on late-night shows, and not just in the political arena: Stewart, who once said that giving O’Reilly a platform was probably “The Daily Show’s” “worst legacy,” left the show in 2015. Fox ousted O’Reilly two years later amid a series of sexual harassment complaints against him, which he described as “completely unfounded.”
Several people online criticized Stewart’s decision to host O’Reilly on the show. Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, who in 2016 sued Fox News CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment, called the decision “unbelievably outrageous … The fact that O’Reilly is back to having a platform promulgates the idea that bad men get comebacks and courageous women continue to be penalized.” Journalist Yashar Ali wrote that there was “no reason to give [O’Reilly] a platform” unless he was asked about the allegations against him.
On the Tuesday evening show, which made no mention of the allegations, O’Reilly said that he and Stewart “are able to disagree without hating each other,” before joking: “Now, I truly hate him, but I don’t — I don’t show it.” Stewart responded: “You hold it very well.”
On the agenda of Tuesday night’s show was the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump at a campaign rally on Saturday and political polarization in the United States. The show was originally scheduled to broadcast from Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention is taking place this week, but returned to its New York studio after the shooting, “The Daily Show” said. Stewart said Tuesday night that the stepped-up security at the convention made it more difficult to host live audiences.
O’Reilly criticized “The View” for leading its coverage with the fact that the shooter at Trump’s campaign rally was a registered Republican.
“Look, you and I are both somewhat fossilized practitioners of the rhetorical arts that are confrontational at times, provocative at times,” responded Stewart. “And we made a really spectacular living pushing those envelopes. It seems now to say, hey, these other people should stop … Shouldn’t the argument be, we have to start arguing with each other in good faith?”
O’Reilly defended criticism and “robust debate” in politics, but said that the “difference” was that “fanatics on the left and the right want to see their opposition destroyed, they want to hurt them.”
Stewart said he did not disagree with O’Reilly’s comments but argued that “there is a feeling [on the right] that they haven’t been doing that and that it is the purview of the left.”
“How can we have a conversation about rhetoric if we can’t even agree — if there are delusions of ‘it’s really only them?’” Stewart added.
Throughout the segment, the two also exchanged jibes, including when O’Reilly mentioned his “job as a journalist,” to which Stewart replied: “Oh, when did you get that job?”
They also debated the presidential records of President Biden and Trump, with O’Reilly listing economic and social issues that he blamed on Biden, while Stewart blamed Trump for a large deficit and high spending on tax cuts. Stewart also mocked O’Reilly’s suggestion that Trump’s actions during the Jan. 6 insurrection “have haunted him every day since,” and disagreed with O’Reilly’s suggestion that Trump would otherwise have had a significant lead in the polls.
O’Reilly and Stewart have frequently faced off over the years: notably, in 2014, they debated the issue of white privilege after the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old Black man, by a White police officer.