In a fun segment last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart took a moment to call out the blogs that derive so much enjoyment from chronicling his witticisms, slams, and wisecracks. They are, he implies, slightly hyperbolic. Pulling up headlines from sites like Mediaite, the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Hot Air, he wonders whether it was a little much to claim that he and other cable hosts like Rachel Maddow have “destroyed,” “disemboweled,” “mauled,” “bitch slapped,” and even “eviscerated” one another. It does seem a little much when you put it all together.
We went back through our coverage to see if we are guilty of this, and we are to some extent (we once said that Jim Cramer was forced to “cower under Stewart’s open palm“). But even if we don’t go to the extremes of a site like Mediaite, we understand the impulse. These are blogs that are writing about a bunch of comfortably well-paid white men and women hiding from the real world in television studios and bickering endlessly back and forth at one another using material spoon-fed to them by researchers, writers, and producers. There is porn on the Internet. Is it any wonder these blogs feel they have to up the ante?
