John King’s erroneous report that a suspect had been identified in conjuction with the Boston bombings triggered a trail of CNN slip-ups on which Daily Show host Jon Stewart made them pay. Chris Cuomo, Fran Townsend and King tried to put the error down to third parties, dodgy sources and mystical events.

“There’s clearly something afoot today,” said King, possibly trying to pin the blame on Harry Potter. “We’re getting some conflicting reports about an arrest,” said Coumo. “The information has been dribbling and drabbling—there’s obviously been a lot of confusion,” added Townsend, using words that don’t really mean anything to explain what happened. Cuomo then summed it all up by saying: “We don’t know what’s right or not right at this point, and as Anderson always says, you don’t want to go down the road of speculation wrongfully.” Well, step in Mr. Stewart, who always knows the right (funny) thing to say. “Well, that’s what you were doing!” he said/screamed in reply.

“You spent an hour debating the merits of your own fiction,” he went on. “See, we’re accustomed to 24-hour news outlets thriving on conflict. Generally, though, that conflict is between two outside parties—political opponents, pundits. But CNN’s reporters have discovered they can remove the middleman and spend hours of programming fighting among themselves.” CNN have been blasted for their reporting of the Boston Bombings, which left 3 dead and almost 200 injured.

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