Jon Stewart blasts MSNBC's Morning Joe for blaming University of Oklahoma's racist chanting video on 'rap music'

Panelists on the MSNBC show blamed the racist video on 'rap music' and 'popular culture'

Jon Stewart's message to the Morning Joe team (Comedy Central)

The Daily Show host Jon Stewart ripped into the panellists of MSNBC show Morning Joe on Wednesday after they blamed “rap music” and “popular culture” for influencing the video that saw members of the University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chant racist songs.

In his late night satire show, Stewart wasted no time criticising the Morning Joe’s presenter Joe Scarborough and panellists William Kristol and Mika Brzezinski with a vitriolic dismissal of their belief that “white audiences” were invariably going to repeat what they heard in the rap music they listen to.

In Wednesday’s show Stewart said: “Two things: first of all, the kids on that bus weren’t repeating a rap song that they had heard.

"They were gleefully performing one of their fraternity’s old, let’s call them anti-Negro spirituals, featuring a word that pre-dates rap. And probably folk. And thought. Black rappers did not introduce that word into the vernacular.

On Sunday, North America’s largest fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon closed down its University of Oklahoma branch after a video emerged that appeared to show a number of its members singing a song that involved the word “n****r” and references to “hanging” prospective black fraternity members.

This caused a major media storm, with a number of news channels providing in-depth analysis on the incident.

Included in this was MSNBC’s popular morning discussion show Morning Joe.

He said: "Popular culture becomes a cesspool, a lot corporations profit off of it, and then people are surprised that some drunk 19-year-old kids repeat what they’ve been hearing."

Mika Brzezinski earlier reacted to the news that rapper Waka Flocka Flame, who had performed at the fraternity just a few months earlier, was "disgusted" by the video, by saying that rappers like Waka Flocka Flame and their liberal use of the “n-word” were to blame for these type of incidents and that Waka Flocka Flame “shouldn’t be disgusted with them — he should be disgusted with himself."

Stewart also used his ten minute review of the media storm surrounding the events to criticise Fox News’ coverage.

He said that Fox and other conservatives continued treatment of incidents like the one that occurred at the University of Oklahoma as "an unending series of isolated events."

He said: "I guess in Fox world, poverty is a choice, but being racist is a product of your environment."