"It wasn’t a big shark but Jon Stewart jumped one just now with the “everybody on Thr cable is the same” naiveté"
Riiiight.
The normally reasonable Ta-Neishi Coates chimed in as well:
I also think Stewart's critique of media as some kind of corrupting force, at times, borders on demagoguery. It's funny to humiliate MSNBC, Fox News or CNN. In fact, both networks are desperately fighting to give their slice of America what they hunger for. We may not like it. It may seem insane to us--but it should never be forgotten that Bill O'Reilly is serving an actual audience, one that would surely invent O'Reilly if he didn't exist. Indeed they've invented him before.
It's interesting that Stewart took a stand on Rick Sanchez's firing. He's certainly argued that Williams shouldn't have been fired before on his show. I may have missed it, but I don't recall him being nearly that generous with Sanchez.
Are we detecting a little media sensitivity out there?
UNLEASH THE MEDIA!!!
Actually, Ta-Neishi, pretty much everyone in America (except for you, apparently) heard Jon Stewart say...on several occassions...that he shouldn't have been fired.
But it wasn't all bad. Andrew Sullivan chimed in:
The point, it seemed to me, was that politics isn't all there is to life, there is something slightly off about those who think it is, and that political ideology has come to define us culturally and personally far too much. So this wasn't an angry rally for the alienated Democratic left; or even a joyous rally like last fall's March for Equality; or a desperate and frustrated rally like the Tea Partiers. No one was demanding their country back; they were just demanding, well asking, for a little less polarization, and a little more mutual understanding. It was an Obama rally that didn't want to be an Obama rally. And it was only an Obama rally sotto voce because he seems currently the only adult in Washington with any interest in compromising with anyone.
There are, after all, three political groupings in American politics Republicans, Democrats and Independents. But there are also three cultural groupings: ideologues, the pragmatists, and the totally indifferent. This was a rally for the pragmatists, which made it, for my money, the core Obama base.
Remember, Andrew's the Conservative in this equation.
UPDATE 3:21pm, Pacific: Believe it or not, Huffington Post looks like it has a good slideshow on the Media reaction to the Rally.
