Bill Maher and John Cleese criticized The New York Times on Maher’s podcast, saying it is no longer the “great newspaper” they once read.
They felt the Times focuses too much on slanted editorializing rather than just reporting facts.
The Times published a piece revealing young individuals “saying the dumbest [expletive],” Maher said.
“And it’s printed in The New York Times,” he said.
“Well, I used to think that was a great newspaper, but I don’t anymore,” Cleese said.
“I don’t either,” Maher said. “I mean, it’s sad because it was like on my breakfast table when I was a kid, it was in my parents’ house.”
“It was what they call a newspaper of record,” Cleese said.
“It was!” Maher said.
Maher and Cleese agreed both sides can lie through omission and it is difficult to get reliable information.
“What is annoying about it is that it’s not just, just give me the facts,” Maher said. “There’s way too much editorializing on the front page, the way the articles that are just supposed to be the fact kind of articles are slanted one way. And I’m not even necessarily for the other side! I just want someone to tell me the whole truth, not just like your version of it. Because you can lie by what you omit. And both sides do.”
“Both sides do,” Cleese said. “And it’s trying to get a really accurate picture of something that’s got harder and harder and harder. When I came to live in America, which, I was here from about 1990 to 2008, I was saying, even in those days, the hard thing now is getting any reliable information.”
A recurring topic was their dislike of “woke” activists, who Maher said don’t see nuance or context and think in black and white terms.
“What makes a great comedy is that it’s also true. And the truth is always shaded. It’s not one-sided,” Maher said. “Why are we so impatient with the woke? Because they don’t see nuance or context. They don’t give any of that kind of [expletive]. It’s all so literally black and white, a lot of it. They didn’t get a good education because the schools collapsed. So they don’t think critically.”
“There’s a lot of people in the American universities who are very pro the sort of woke that you and I don’t like,” Cleese said.
“They’re insane!” Maher said. “They’ve got the kids marching for the terrorists!”
Cleese said people get in trouble when they see themselves as entirely good or others as entirely bad, leading to denial and projection.
“It’s because they think that people are either all good or bad,” Cleese said. “My mother, who was not a philosopher, said there’s good and bad in everyone. And if you ever forget that, you’re into trouble because the moment that people start thinking they’re better than they really are, then they start doing the denial and projection and seeing all their negative stuff in the people they don’t like. And then you’ve got a paranoid confrontation between the two.”
Maher criticized younger generations for only learning from buzzwords rather than reading longer texts, citing their misuse of terms like “colonizer” regarding Israel.
“The kids haven’t read anything longer than a TikTok,” Maher said. “They know everything by way of buzzwords. They learn these words like ‘colonizer.’ They don’t know what ‘colonizer’ – as if Israel colonized that place, which is, of course, where the Jews are from. Jerusalem. Hello! The Bible, you know, the one where Jesus was born a Christian,” he quipped.
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