PressEthic

The latest issue of Rolling Stone features an interview piece by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd profiling omnipresent comedic anchors Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report. The article, especially the interview, is really more funny than insightful. Most of all, however, it emphasizes the point that Stewart and Colbert have been making all along: people just don't get it.

Throughout the interview, Dowd is sort of admiring, while implying that she thinks she's in on the joke. She reminds the reader of an Indiana University study that found that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are as substantive as the real network news programs they mock, and seems to think that her appreciation of their work is enough to impress the two when she finally meets them.

"At last, they turn their attention to me. Their gazes are not, as I'd expected, full of respect," she writes. She attributes their attitudes to her clunky old tape recorder, but there's clearly more going on here. Stewart and Colbert lament that they are misunderstood. Stewart says he sees the recent proliferation of Stewart/Colbert '08 t-shirts serve as evidence of the way their viewers and the media have latched on to this next big thing without really understanding how it came into being. " 'Nothing says 'I'm ashamed of you, my government' more than Stewart/Colbert '08, ' Stewart told New Yorker editor David Remnick at the magazine's fall cultural festival."

To them, the media circus around them - and the very fact that Maureen Dowd has been sent to write a cover story about them - only reinforces their main point: that the press is asleep at the wheel while the government drags the country down into hell.

Meanwhile, Dowd doesn't seem to get it, still dwelling on Stewart and Colbert's perceived biases and their place in celebrity culture. But they maintain that there is no inherent magic in what they do, and that the miserable world of television news does all the work for them.

At a New York Times lunch, when Stewart was asked how his show did such a good job digging up clips catching the president and other officials contradicting themselves, the comedian shot back, "A clerk and a video machine."