President Barack Obama says that Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart is “brilliant” and that the liberal comedian has more “credibility” than some established news organizations.
“I think Jon Stewart’s brilliant,” Obama told Rolling Stone. “It’s amazing to me the degree to which he’s able to cut through a bunch of the nonsense — for young people in particular, where I think he ends up having more credibility than a lot of more conventional news programs do.”
Obama brought up Stewart while discussing his TV watching habits. It’s the fourth time in the last four years that the magazine has slobbered over Obama during an exclusive interview.
“I don’t watch a lot of TV news,” he said. “I don’t watch cable at all. I like The Daily Show, so sometimes if I’m home late at night, I’ll catch snippets of that.”
The president said he spends “a lot of time just reading reports, studies, briefing books, intelligence assessments.”
“I’ll thumb through all the major papers in the morning,” Obama said. “I’ll read the Times and Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, just to catch up.”
Obama also called New York Times columnist Paul Krugman “one of the smartest economic reporters out there” and acknowledged reading “some of the conservative columnists, just to get a sense of where those arguments are going.”
Follow Alex on Twitter