Last night, Samantha Bee took aim at Matt Lauer, the man who soundtracks people’s morning rituals (do people still actually watch the Today Show as they’re getting ready, or is that just a (very banal) myth?) who unfortunately was also the moderator of a pre-debates Commander-in-Chief forum with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump last week. There, he devoted an obnoxious amount of time to the email scandal and then asked Clinton for brevity on small issues like, say, foreign policy/war; he then proceeded to not question Trump when he claimed to have been against the war in Iraq.
Bee’s always been good at insults, and it’s especially enjoyable seeing her relishing taking down another TV personality who was, for some reason, granted political sway. “The moderator is a man whose crack journalism skills include getting up early and asking tough questions about recipes,” she says, at which point the video cuts to footage of Matt Lauer asking someone a very political questions about where to put Cheese-Its.
Discussing Lauer’s disproportionate focus on the emails, Bee said:
Oh come on Matt — do you really think there’s an email smoking gun that the inspector general, the house committee, the FBI and 18 months of nonstop news coverage couldn’t find, that’ll be magically uncovered by seven minutes from a human Splenda, whose crowning journalistic triumph is having no idea where the fuck he is?
(The screen cuts to the recurring image for Lauer’s former Today Show segment, “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?”) Bee notes that she’s certainly not the first to criticize Lauer (Flavorwire’s own Sarah Seltzer took on Lauer “letting neofascist Donald Trump skate by with predictable falsehoods” last week) for his interviews with the presidential candidates, but Bee notes that perhaps the worst insult of all was when a Fox News anchor deemed him “fair” and said she felt like she was watching Fox News.
Watch: