The One With Aldacron

In the era of Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, John Chancellor, and Harry Reasoner, it wouldn’t have been necessary to turn to a comedy cable network for a rational take on the news. Today, in the era of corporate media conglomerates, there’s very little choice. The quality of journalism today is a far cry from what it used to be. From the extreme cases like Fox News, which hardly deserves to be called a news network, to the less obvious cases found across the networks and the major newspapers. Especially when it comes to politics. Glenn Greenwald frequently harps on this issue on his blog, where he rails against the penchant journalists have today for automatically granting anonymity to their sources. A recent Greenwald post, for example, takes on Jeffrey Rosen and The New Republic for publishing anonymous smears against a potential Supreme Court nominee.

So while an aging, and increasingly irrelevant, segment of the population stays glued to Fox News or other mainstream media sources, young forward-looking progressives are turning to faux journalists who are passionate about entertaining their audiences, but also feel strongly about the state of the world and the direction America is going. Of course, I’m talking about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Stewart’s passion for his country often shows through in his interviews, such as it did in a recent episode where he discussed torture with Cliff May. Colbert’s passion comes through in the cerebral humor that he is so good at. Such as in this particular segment below.

Now, somebody just let the Republicans know that he’s not really a conservative.