Jon Stewart on journalism, "The Daily Show," and blogs.

Bill Moyers tells Jon Stewart that for all his protestations that "The Daily Show" is not journalism, it's "acting like" journalism and a lot of young people consume it as journalism. Stewart responds:

I can assure them they're not getting any journalism from us. We are, if anything — I do believe we function as a sort of editorial cartoon. That we are a digestive process, like so many other digestive processes that go on. The thing about you know, there's a lot of young people get this and you know, young people get that from me. People are very sophisticated consumers of information, and they're pulling all different things.

It's the same argument people say about the blogs. The blogs are responsible. No, they're not. The blogs are like anything else. You judge each one based on its own veracity and intelligence and all of that. And if you like, you could cherry pick only the things that you agree with from various things. Or, if you want, you can try and get a broader perspective, or you can find people who are absolutely out of their minds, or find people that are doing incredibly complex and interesting and urgent journalism. And the same goes for our show. It's a prism into people's own ideologies, when they watch our program. This is just our take.

...

I started writing this post three hours ago. Why couldn't I finish it? I had my usual instinct that there was good material here and set it up in my usual way, but then, reading it over, trying to think of a way to add a few lines of my own, I just couldn't get anywhere.

Stewart has a funny way of seeming direct and then circling around and trying out different angles as if he might get somewhere. Note how the first sentence is a straightforward denial. Then he tries two different metaphors -- cartooning and digesting -- and I think he indicates that he realizes that the second one creates the image that the show is shit when he says "like so many other digestive processes that go on." Then he starts to try to deal with another problematic implication, that young people are idiots. He gropes toward a way to say that that they somehow know how to understand what part of the digestively processed material can be understood as news. They're sophisticated! Like those blog readers, who do... whatever the hell it is they do... use the blogs as "a prism" to see what they actually believe or something.

But I like Jon Stewart. I've been watching his show again. I'm just saying he has a strange way of speaking that shows up in the transcript form. It's pretty charming and entertaining on the show, where he presents himself as sort of confused and troubled by everything. He's the interviewer there, searching for answers, so it all makes sense. But if he's being interviewed and he's the one providing the answers, it's weird and evasive.

(Via Memeorandum.)