Jon Stewart will host his final episode of "The Daily Show" on Thursday night, and Roger Ailes made sure to hurl a few insults at him on his way out the door.
The Fox News chairman and CEO told The Hollywood Reporter that Stewart probably feels disappointed he never got "rid of" him.
"As he faces the end of his career, he’s beginning to wonder: ‘Is this as popular as I’m ever going to get? Is this as much power as I’ll ever have? The one person I could never get rid of was Roger Ailes. I tried. I did everything I could,’" Ailes said in the interview, published Wednesday. "This was all a plea to his lefty friends. I think he’s disappointed that he didn’t accomplish that goal, and we, of course, supplied him with half of his comedy."
Ailes also said Stewart probably hates that his network is successful.
“He’s feeling unrewarded because Fox News beats him on the amount of money we make, on ratings and on popularity," Ailes told THR.
It seems a bit lopsided to compare the ratings and revenues of a single show with those of an entire network -- not exactly fair and balanced, one might say -- but Ailes is simply using the go-to defense that Fox News tends to employ in the face of criticism.
Rather than addressing the substance of the critiques lobbied at it, those at the network often simply accuse detractors of being, as James Franco's character in "The Interview" might put it, peanut butter and jealous.
In March, for example, amid a controversy over allegations that he embellished or fabricated several of his war reporting experiences, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly went on a five-minute tirade about the network's biggest-kid-on-the-block status.
"If FNC did not exist, America would be a far different place," he said. "The far-left ideology would have a far different time. But we do exist," he went on, "and now dominate the primetime news cycle."
In the same episode, O'Reilly claimed that other news networks look at Fox News with envy.
"MSNBC and CNN are getting hammered economically by Fox News," he said. "The failure of those operations to compete effectively against us has cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. Some who work for those channels are desperate -- their own jobs [are] now in jeopardy.”
Comedy Central declined to comment for this article.
H/T Mediaite