Jon Stewart Somehow Forgot About Bill O’Reilly’s Non-Political Awfulness During Last Night’s ‘Daily Show’

Last night, Jon Stewart invited his age-old rival Bill O’Reilly onto The Daily Show to demonstrate how even ideological adversaries can disagree with respect and civility. There are (at least) five female staffers from Fox News who could use O'Reilly’s depositions as counterpoints.

Throughout his ongoing gig as the Monday night host of The Daily Show, Stewart has made a point to distinguish the current political division in America from the left-versus-right dynamics of his heyday back in the 2000s, when decorum and democracy itself were both held in higher regard by both sides of the aisle. Any longtime Daily Show fan would probably prefer to live in a political landscape where Sarah Palin’s disastrous interviews were the most scandalous stories of the election cycle, and, even at its most acrimonious, the battle for the White House was underscored by a mutual respect and a dedication to the preservation of democratic values.

To best illustrate the deterioration of the national dialogue, last night, Stewart invited a former Fox News ideologue and perennial Daily Show punching bag to debate the dangers of political fanaticism in our current cultural climate while the host and guest found common ground on their shared belief in the power of agreeing to disagree. 

Personally, I’ll agree to disagree with Stewart’s decision to platform and play nice with a guy who was too much of a misogynistic slimeball for Fox News of all places, and who forced the company to pay out $13 million in settlements for sexual harassment lawsuits to five different women whom he (allegedly) terrorized.

Throughout the interview, which covered a wide range of topics that included the recent assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, the impact of the January 6th Insurrection on the upcoming election and President Biden’s performance in office, Stewart and O’Reilly traded plenty of playful barbs over their past rivalry as the TV thought leaders of their respective political parties.

“If you Google Stewart and I, we are able to disagree without hating each other,” O'Reilly addressed the audience early in the interview, adding with a dash of snark, “Now, I truly hate him, but I don’t show it!”

“But, now, that’s not rewarded. That kind of detente where two people look at life differently isn’t rewarded. The haters get the big money. And, so, that’s what you have,” O'Reilly posited before vaguely indicting the corporate news cycle that made him a millionaire.

While Stewart pushed back on many of O’Reilly’s indictments of MSNBC and other left-leaning political outlets that the conservative has blamed the degradation of political dialogue on, Stewart entirely avoided addressing the litany of sexual harassment lawsuits and subsequent settlements that led to O'Reilly’s former home at Fox News cutting ties with him in 2017. 

Instead, Stewart made some D-tier, old-school late-night jokes about the size of O'Reilly’s current following. At one point, O’Reilly bragged about the impressive viewership of his new show No Spin News, which inspired Stewart to exclaim, “What?? Four million?” *straightens tie* “Mmm, that’s a lotta cheese!”

Well, so is the $32 million that O’Reilly personally paid to Fox News legal analyst Lis Wiehl after he allegedly forced a “non-consensual sexual relationship” upon the reporter, according to The New York Times. After the details of that settlement leaked in 2017, Fox News, United Talent Agency and O’Reilly’s literary agent WME all dropped the alleged sex pest — but Stewart didn’t.

While I understand the importance of what Stewart is trying to do to repair the fractured and fanaticized political dialogue that will only amplify between now and November, his decision to promote and appease a man who has paid out many fortunes in hush money to the alleged victims of his sex crimes shows an absolute lack of integrity that’s beneath the ideals Stewart claims to champion.

There are certainly less reprehensible Republican figureheads who have not succumbed to the extremism of Trump’s cult of personality and who would have agreed to debate the exact same points that O’Reilly and Stewart discussed last night, but, from a deeply cynical perspective, none of them would have drawn the ratings as The Daily Show’s oldest adversary stepping up to the guest chair and talking about civility as if he’d never shown a disgusting lack of it toward women in his former workplace. 

Maybe Stewart chose O’Reilly for the interview because The Daily Show legend knew that many moderate Republicans would listen to O’Reilly’s pleas for a return to respectful disagreement. Or, maybe, O’Reilly is a tried-and-true eyeball magnet who can provide The Daily Show with a reliable ratings boost during a sluggish July that’s seen a cable-wide drop off in viewership. Whatever the motivations behind booking O’Reilly, the result is the same — a man who is supposed to represent political media’s moral compass made a man who allegedly used his powerful position in that same industry to sexually harass and abuse women seem affable and respectable.

Stewart might as well just invite Tucker Carlson on to discuss the importance of respecting the integrity of our elections.