Traditionally trained journalists have been throwing “fat pitches” — easy to hit baseballs served up to a batter to blast out of the park for a home run.  Stewart, thank goodness, asked tough questions.

I like the U.K. Guardian’s take on it:

His assault on Wall Street began in earnest with a classic Daily Show technique: a series of juxtaposed clips revealing incompetence and hypocrisy

He accused CNBC hosts and pundits of abandoning their journalistic duties and acting like cheerleaders for the market.

The interview was one of those classic television moments that crystallised the public mood in the credit crisis. Stewart articulated the anger and bewilderment of millions of Americans who now feel ripped off and afraid. He framed the question everyone wanted asked: how were the financial masters of the universe allowed to pursue their ruinous behaviour unchallenged for so long?

It caught the attention of the White House, prompted a frenzy among bloggers and soul-searching in the media, which failed to spot the biggest story of a lifetime or warn the public until it was too late. Indeed, CNBC and other supposedly objective journalists stood accused of complicity with big business, belonging to a cosy coterie that egged on company chief executives and fanned the flames of excess.

CNBC is a parade CEOs as talking press releases (in other words, our future is so bright, buy my stock and pump up the share price) as well as an “Entertainment Tonight” style of egocentric commentators whose motivation is to get their faces on TV and enable CNBC to sell ads.

I really don’t want to hear how Obama is the first “African-American President” or listen to any talk of the significance of his race. Let’s just welcome him as our new president. Quit parading around the race card and get on with things.

My son is 4 years old and as far as he is concerned, race, color, creed is irrelevant and meaningless. Let’s keep it that way.

During the past few years, newspaper owners demanded and were getting at 20–40 percent profit, among the highest for any industry–and that includes Big Oil.

Go to any journalism conference, and you’ll see a lot of hand-wringing. Reporters and editors are whining about how bad it is. They rightly blame owners and publishers. But, they also blame readers for accepting abbreviated news drops from TV and myriad cable networks. They whine about the Blogosphere and Internet domination. They complain about the short attention span of their readers. It’s this and it’s that. And so, with the help of $500 an hour consultants who eruditely harrumph their grandeur of divine guesses, they make cosmetic changes.

The system is broken, and it’s the owners’ fault.

He will be paid $10 million as part of a $300 million ad campaign that promotes Windows Vista.  Story also reported in the Seattle P-I .

From not just NBC ("Nothing But Commercials"), but also the usually far superior CBUT Canadian broadcast. Are men’s beach volleyball or traditional indoor gym volleyball Olympic events?

Each one of the above devices stood for "the small screen."  I’ll take a stab that the age of the author is directly proportional to the size of said author’s screen. Meaning, the older the author, the bigger his or her so-called "small" screen.

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

Every year

if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.