Stewart made the event one of the show's top stories, opening the segment with the following:
"For the past three or four years, those of us in the iPhone community have sacrificed one thing for the ability to carry around every photograph we’ve ever taken, or song we’ve ever listened to, or home video, or compass. We have sacrificed the ability to make phone calls. For years, struggling with the world's most popular, almost phone. Well, our long national nightmare may soon be over."At this point they cut to a clip of Verizon's CEO Lowell McAdam announcing the new Verizon iPhone on its network. They then cut back to Stewart, shouting:
"Freedom! Freedom! Freedom, actually to switch providers."Stewart then showed how he was forced to carry a second phone to make calls (a pink toy phone one which his four-year-old daughter wants back), and his expensive $400 method he uses to send text messages on the iPhone: typing it into his iPhone and having a messenger take the phone to, say, Stephen Colbert.
Stewart then turned to John Oliver for his video report. The transmission was poor because Oliver was using his AT&T iPhone to make a video call (realistically, FaceTime only works on wi-fi, so it really shouldn't matter). At any rate, we see a "Call failed" image come up mid-call, as Oliver loses the connection; he later calls back and said he thinks he must have "looked at a tunnel."
We then saw Oliver's report on the iPhone, which opened to the statement "America had suffered far too long," and continues with Oliver showing clips of existing AT&T iPhone users complaining about good service in one part of their house and no signal in others, calls that "drop all the time," and the tyranny of the AT&*T regime, where "the service is horrible." Quite a few of the comments were bleeped out, and quite a few gestures were blurred out (as you might imagine).
"It feel like we're a technology hostage," one woman said, while a man added, "it's like being a slave." Oliver then described the Verizon announcement as "a moment of liberation," showing the moment we had previously described at the event, and staging events with people shouting "Down with tyranny" as they pulled down signs with AT&T logos and stomped on them.
The segment concluded with Oliver saying "1/11/11, a date that will forever be known as VZ day," with the image of a returning sailor kissing his girl in Times Square, as he glanced at his iPhone (much as that famous picture that was taken at the end of World War II on V-J Day).
Watch the segment below.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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