Jon Stewart’s famous 2004 appearance on CNN’s Crossfire remains a standout takedown of the pernicious culture of spin that dominates cable news. Revisiting the clip nearly seventeen years later, it’s immediately obvious why many of us still look back on it so favorably.

In debating cohosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, Stewart was effortlessly funny, rhetorically effective, and, in a few instances, practically lethal. Though he made fools of his interlocutors and their show, Stewart’s real target was, of course, the ethos they embodied — one summed up aptly enough by Begala during his intro: “As our loyal viewers, of course, know, our show is about all left versus white [sic], black versus white, paper versus plastic, Red Sox against the Yankees.”

Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal, rural versus urban, coasts versus hinterland: it’s difficult to deny that American media, and cable networks in particular, often trades in reductive binaries and emotionally potent oversimplification. Division, after all, tends to be good for business, and cable news is probably best understood as a medium sitting firmly at the intersection of corporate profits and commodified hyperpartisanship. Stewart, whose appearance on Crossfire went viral again this week, wasn’t wrong to dismiss the hosts’ claims that they were simply providing a forum for honest ideological “debate”: