On Monday night, Jon Stewart delivered a blistering monologue targeting the corporate media executives that have caved to Donald Trump in an attempt to stay in his good graces. Sitting behind "The Daily Show" desk, Stewart railed against what he described as a growing tendency among media owners to water down their content in hopes of avoiding backlash from the president. “If you believe your properties can serve gruel so flavorless that you will never again” trigger Trump, he said, “you are fucking wrong.” He accused these executives of operating out of fear of upsetting a man he described as a “fragile and vengeful president” and warned in no uncertain terms what he thought of the approach: “If you’re afraid and you protect your bottom line, I’ve got but one thing to say. Just one little phrase: Go fuck yourself.”

The monologue was a defense of Stewart’s longtime friend Stephen Colbert, whose "Late Show" was abruptly canceled last week. While Paramount, CBS’ parent company, has claimed the decision was made purely for “financial reasons,” Stewart made clear he wasn’t buying it. In Stewart’s telling, the late-night host had become the latest casualty of corporate cowardice—a high-profile sacrifice by executives more interested in appeasing power than standing up to it.

Which is precisely what made the next segment of "The Daily Show" so striking. Stewart welcomed Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong for an interview that was oddly gentle and unchallenging, particularly given the context of the fiery monologue that had preceded it. Soon-Shiong, a billionaire media owner and biotech entrepreneur, is exactly the type of figure Stewart had just spent several minutes condemning, one of the elite media titans who has overtly bent the knee to Trump. And yet, rather than pressing him on his record, Stewart conducted the interview with a surprisingly soft touch. In essence, he told people like Soon-Shiong to “go fuck yourself”—and then handed one of them a comfortable platform on national television minutes later.