Send in the Clowns

Jon Stewart was on the front page of the Washington Post yesterday, he's in Section IV of the New York Times today, and CSPAN was broadcasting an event with Stewart being grilled about media issues and public policy by Ken Auletta in front of corporate and media bigwigs all day yesterday.

Sometimes it takes a trickster figure, a wise fool, or a clown to point out our foibles. Alas, it took Jon Stewart going on Crossfire and telling Paul Begala that he was hurting America, and calling Tucker Carlson a dick, to wake up our punditocracy to the fact that we're playing a shameless game in which everyone knows we're playing a shameless game, but no one has the balls to take a stand. Carlson had recently pointed out that Karen Hughes lied to him, knew she was lying to him, knew he knew she was lying to him, but they both sort of played along in the spin game nonetheless. But since Stewart's wonderful outburst, and his own spin of his Crossfire meltdown, I've seen Russert and Stephanaupolis and Matthews and even O'Reilly more willingly calling a spade a spade when confronted with distortions by BOTH parties. The Post and Times are more frequently running fact-check columns, and post-debate coverage, instead of ONLY featuring spinmeisters from each party, actually had reporters--gasp--checking facts! Stewart has been hammering at the media for its "he said, he said" reporting, and at last the message is getting some play. An Annenberg study which found that Stewart's audience tended to be more politically sophisticated and knowledgeable than the viewers of broadcast news also added fuel to the sudden desire by corporate news to do some self-assessment.

Watch his CSPAN thing if you get a chance. It's funny, but it's also important, just like his show (which I don't get to see often enough). We need more Stewarts and more Triumph the Insult Comic Dogs (I've yet to see the clip of Triumph in the spin room after the last debate, but what I've read of the transcript made me cry it was soooo damn good).