Saturday, November 13, 2004

Guilt by association

This quote from the WSJ piece by Daniel Henninger bugged me:
A survey by the Pew Research Center reports that over three years from January 2000, the percentage of people getting candidate and campaign news fell 9% for daily newspapers, 10% for network news and 5% for news magazines. The numbers rose, up to 4%, for cable news, the Internet and comedy TV shows (Jon Stewart's rise as a news authority figure is the court jester displacing the journalistic monarchy).
Why link Jon Stewart with the Internet?

Stewart has much more in common with Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer than he does with PowerLine or Little Green Footballs or Kos. Lumping an unfunny comic playing a newscaster in with the whole Internet is just an esteem-boosting ploy. The MSM may be shrinking, but they are being squeezed out by sources that are just unserious, you see-- intellectual junk food for the lazy and stupid. It's not Dan's fault, or Bill Kellers, or Aaron Brown's.

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