If you are a fan of Jon Stewart or are interested in US politics, you have to watch this CNN Crossfire clip. It’s a wild ride. Jon Stewart, invited onto Crossfire, a show he regularly ridicules, chastises the hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for not doing what the media should be doing. His simple message to the Crossfire hosts, seemingly lost to them, is that they are not doing the job the media should be doing — instead of asking the hard questions to the politicians, they’ve become part of the political strategy. They are fed sound bites and campaign bits and pieces to yell and scream about on their show when they should be engaging in serious political discourse.
What really amazed me is that Carlson accused Stewart of cozying up to John Kerry, failing to recognize that what Jon Stewart does is comedy. IT’S COMEDY! Stewart reminds them several times that his show is on Comedy Central and doesn’t purport to be a news show. But Crossfire is on CNN and does and that’s the difference.
It’s a pretty gripping 15 minutes of video that’s worth watching. Stewart is right — he had a clip on a previous episode where he showed how the talking points from each campaign is repeated over and over by the political pundits instead of them doing serious journalism. It’s a sad commentary on our political system, but one that I expect to change over the next several years. Publishing is continuing down the long road of disintermediation and the rise of the blogger is making that happen. Over the next several years, more micropublishing opportunities will arise. The next big thing may be an “IINN” — an Independent Internet News Network — that will begin to take on CNN and Fox and the other outfits that have fundamentally become schlock journalism.