Jon Stewart warns Joe Rogan’s critics

Former US talk show host Jon Stewart defended Joe Rogan amid the ongoing row over alleged Covid-19 ‘conspiracy theories’ by questioning “who gets to decide” what is, and is not, misinformation. Stewart likened the situation to his opposition to the 2003 Iraq War, which he said could have prompted similar calls to “censor” him.

During an episode of his ‘The Problem with Jon Stewart’ podcast on Thursday, the comedian noted that newspapers promoting the Bush administration’s claims of there being weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, in the run-up to the invasion, were not held accountable for spreading “misinformation.”

“The New York Times was a giant purveyor of misinformation, and disinformation... And that’s as vaunted a media organization as you can find, but there was no accountability for them,” Stewart said, adding that the paper reported about Saddam Hussein, WMDs and “tubes that can only be used for nuclear war,” among other things.

Stewart, who was a prominent and vocal opponent of the war, added that he “was promoting what they would call misinformation” by criticizing the coverage. “But it turned out to be right years later and the establishment media was wrong.”

And not only were they wrong, you could make the case that they enabled a war that killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people and never paid a price for it and never had accountability.

Noting that his Comedy Central show was not censored by Viacom, the network’s parent company, at the time for his opposition, Stewart said that nobody is “owed a platform.” But he added that “these are shifting sands” and expressed his concern with the question about who “gets to decide” what is categorized as “misinformation.”

While acknowledging that he had a “bias” towards the embattled podcaster since he knows him personally, Stewart said it is “very easy to attack Rogan” and that there were “things there to talk about,” but urged caution “because the sands can shift.”

Rogan has come under fire in recent weeks after being accused of promoting Covid-19 and vaccine misinformation on his popular Spotify podcast, ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’. After the platform resisted calls to drop Rogan, a handful of musicians, including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, have pulled their music from the app in protest.

Last week, Stewart criticized their actions as a “mistake” and “overreaction.”