Jon Stewart Hates Media's New Trend After Shootings

He rips the the rush to identify the politics of the shooter
Posted Sep 30, 2025 8:39 AM CDT
Jon Stewart Hates New Trend After Mass Shootings
Jon Stewart takes part in an interview outside the Department of Veterans Affairs, July 26, 2024 in Washington.   (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf, File)

Jon Stewart has a beef with media from the left and the right over what he sees as an awful new trend in coverage of mass shootings—the panicked rush to identify the shooter's political leanings. "It's America's new gender reveal tradition," he complained on the latest Daily Show, per Mediaite. "The game is so ubiquitous, now we often play it before we even know who the perpetrator is."

  • Stewart rolled clips of outlets including Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN digging into shooters' voting records and the like, complaining about an obsession with "left-right framing." He laid part of the blame on a familiar culprit: "Social media is doing it crazier and faster than anybody else, so the media is trying to keep up."

  • Stewart noted there was a time not too long ago when news media often declined to shower too much attention on shooters, for fear of spawning copycats, per Variety. Those days appear to be long gone.
  • The problem is that "mass shootings do not fit neatly into our left-right paradigm," says Stewart. "Mass shootings are probably caused by a complex fusion of mental health and access to weapons and attention-seeking, delusional nihilism, married to an algorithmic underworld that set these horrific acts in motion. But unfortunately, left-right paradigm is the only way our narcissistic media ecosystem sees anything anymore."

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