Excellent article on the state of the media. With more props to "The Daily Show."

From the Baltimore Sun

In today's 24/7 blizzard of news, facts are elusive and objective analysis is hard to find.

That's one of the things you are seeing in the success of The Daily Show," Mindich says, reporting that he found many followers of the Comedy Channel program among those under 40 whom he interviewed.

"Jon Stewart does not allow politicians to get away with what they say. So if you are totally sick of hearing things from politicians that you know to be untrue, you tune into something like The Daily Show and you have an ally in Jon Stewart. He calls them like he sees them," Mindich says.

Journalism and journalists have become so blurred with advocacy and entertainment that the public does not really have good ways of distinguishing among them, so they all get painted with the same broad brush," Carpini says."The world looks at Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and thinks 'news media'," says Kunkel. "We look at them and think 'entertainers' as much as anything. So we have this dreadful dissonance, the worst of all worlds, when they can have it their way. When it does not suit them to live up to their journalistic principles, they can say they are just entertainers. But when they want to be perceived as members of the media establishment, they can claim to be journalists...read on