What Is 'The Media'? (Jon Stewart Edition)
If the Jon Stewart-hosted Daily Show was media criticism in the guise of comedy, it was a very particular kind of criticism of a very particular kind of media. Stewart and his merry band of satirists, for the most part, aimed their jokes at the bright and broad target of cable TV news: Fox, MSNBC, and CNN. And The Daily Show, itself a parody of a televised newsmagazine, was especially equipped to do that: If you’re going to mock something, you should, at a bare minimum, understand the way it works.
In the year-and-a-half since he left that hosting gig, though, Stewart seems to have taken a much broader view of the American press—and he has expanded his criticism in turn. Nowadays, Stewart simply talks about “the media”: the institution, the looming creature, the plural noun that is generally treated, revealingly, as a
