Here’s your quote of the day and you should read it a couple of times so that it’s seared into your memory:

“Just because Jon Stewart makes fun of it doesn’t mean he’s right.”

That’s CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker, at a meeting of the Atlanta Press Club earlier this week. Zucker was smugly brushing off the criticism his network has been on the receiving end of since he took control and turned it into the Poop Cruise channel. According to the man most famous for running NBC into the ground — laying the foundation, or lack thereof, that would take it from first place to an unprecedented fifth place in the national numbers — those mocking CNN on other TV outlets are just jealous, while the torrent of ridicule the network has faced lately on social media is merely to be ignored, particularly those irritating voices on Twitter, a platform he considers a “frenemy.” Jeff Zucker, by the way, is apparently a 16-year-old Mean Girl holding court at Beverly Hills High School.

When he took over CNN, Zucker notoriously said that he was going to broaden the definition of journalism to the point where, one would imagine, he’d be able to put anything on CNN and call it news — employing a twist on the Nixonian logic that if the president does it, it’s not illegal — while also suddenly viewing half of what was on cable as his competition. To that end, after his self-satisfied shot at Jon Stewart, he admitted that he considers The Daily Show one of those new competitors.

Maybe that’s what makes it so entertaining that Jon Stewart gets to rub Zucker’s face in CNN’s breathtaking fuck-up yesterday, the one that saw network stalwart John King report that there had been an arrest in the Boston Marathon bombing and, at the prodding of Wolf Biltzer, that the man under arrest was a “dark-skinned male.” Now make no mistake, there’s nothing at all funny about CNN’s embarrassing mistake, which truly was one for the ages, a moment that should live on literally as a teachable one by being examined closely in every first-year broadcast journalism class at every university across the country for decades to come.

We all know what eventually wound up happening: CNN was wrong. Dead wrong. About everything. And it had to walk it all back live on the air while trying desperately to cover its own ass. A national news network had reported that an arrest had been made in a terrorist attack and that the suspect very likely confirmed the worst fears of a very large segment of the public. The implications for America and for a hell of a lot of Americans couldn’t be overstated. And the whole damn thing was wrong.

And so, last night, pointing out the disastrous impact the report could’ve had for the country and did have for CNN while also, admittedly, enjoying more than a little understandable schadenfreude, Jon Stewart eviscerated CNN on The Daily Show — and took a not-so-subtle shot right at Zucker by running clips of the initial CNN “exclusive” and saying with phony diffidence, “You know, this is why you turn to CNN in a crisis. We make fun of them sometimes… you know, as one of their competitors I guess we just get a little jealous.” It was a personal slap across Zucker’s face that no one in the audience probably got, but if you followed TV closely was a moment to cherish.

There isn’t a person out there with a working pair of eyes and ears and a knowledge of recent events who doesn’t know that Jeff Zucker is a narcissistic ass with a history of failing upward who’s practically destined to destroy what remains of the once-great CNN from the inside out. Yesterday’s on-air disgrace shows that it’s already happening, and Zucker’s arrogant dismissal of those who know what’s coming and who publicly lament it lets you know that what we’re seeing now is only the beginning.

Yeah, Jeff, maybe Jon Stewart’s not right about everything he makes fun of. But he’s right about CNN.

CNN just proved it.

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By Jeff Cohen

I spent years as a political pundit on mainstream TV – at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. I was outnumbered, outshouted, red-baited and finally terminated. Inside mainstream media, I saw that major issues were not only dodged, but sometimes not even acknowledged to exist.

The Daily Show host Jon Stewart is one of the few voices on American television who occasionally breaks with the national security consensus.

Today there’s an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don’t. It’s arguably our country’s biggest problem – a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War).

That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war.

In 1967, King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” – and said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Nowadays MSNBC hosts yell at Fox News hosts, and vice versa, about all sorts of issues – but when the Obama administration expanded the bloody war in Afghanistan, the shouting heads at both channels went almost silent. When Obama’s drone war expanded, there was little shouting. Not at MSNBC, not at Fox. Nor at CNN, CBS, ABC or so-called public broadcasting.

We can have raging debates in mainstream media about issues like gun control and gay marriage and minimum wage, but when the elites of both parties agree on military intervention – as they so often do – debate is nearly nonexistent. Anyone in the mainstream who goes out on a limb to loudly question this oversized creature in the middle of the room known as militarism or interventionism is likely to disappear faster than you can say “Phil Donahue.”

I know something about mainstream journalists being silenced for questioning bipartisan military adventures because I worked with Phil Donahue at MSNBC in 2002/03 when Bush was revving up the Iraq invasion with the support of Democratic leaders like Joe Biden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid. That’s when MSNBC terminated us for the crime of JWI. Not DWI, but JWI – Journalism during Wartime while Independent.

JWI may be a crime in mainstream media, but it’s exactly the kind of unauthorized, unofficial coverage you get from quality independent media today and from un-embedded journalists like Jeremy Scahill, Dahr Jamail and Glenn Greenwald.

Unfortunately, many liberal journalists who were vocal about war, human rights and civil liberties during the Bush era lost their voices as Obama continued and, in some cases, expanded Bush’s “War on Terror” policies. It says something about the lack of serious national debate on so-called national security that last month one of the loudest mainstream TV news questioners of the president’s right to assassinate Americans was Sean Hannity on Fox. That’s obscene.

And it says something about mainstream TV that the toughest, most consistent questioners of militarism and defenders of civil liberties are not on a news channel – they’re on the comedy channel. A few weeks ago, I watched a passionate Jon Stewart taking on the U.S. military budget: “We already spend more on defense than the next 12 countries combined, including China, including Russia. We’re like the lady on Jerry Springer who can’t stop getting breast implants.” (On screen was a photo of the Springer guest.)

What our mainstream media so obediently call the “War on Terror” is experienced in other countries as a U.S. war OF terror – kidnappings, night raids, torture, drone strikes, killing and maiming of innocent civilians – that creates new enemies for our country. Interestingly, you can easily find that reality in mainstream media of allied countries in Europe, but not in the mainstream media of our country. Needless to say, it’s our country that’s waging this global perpetual war.

In a democracy, war must be subjected to questioning and debate. And not just on the comedy channel.

Jeff Cohen is founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College and an associate professor of journalism there. His latest book is Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. He founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986. This column is adapted from remarks made April 6 at the National Conference on Media Reform in Denver.

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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I’m not sure where I’d be if I woke up one morning and discovered that Alternet and Salon were suddenly bastions of rational, practical thinking, free from ridiculously pie-in-the-sky moralizing and a lot of liberals shooting themselves in the collective foot. I think it would be like Matt Taibbi finding out that Tom Friedman had finally learned how to use metaphors properly and wasn’t incessantly fixated on drawing grand global theories based on a two-minute conversation he had with his driver. What would I have to give me a laugh with my morning coffee if there weren’t David Sirota and columns like the one on Jon Stewart currently getting the Alternet-Salon double-barreling?

In the piece, titled “7 Examples of Cowardice on ‘The Daily Show’,” blogger Scott Hill calls out what he sees as a pattern of spinelessness on the part of Jon Stewart, even going so far as to ask why the host “wimps out” so often. Sure, he mentions right off the bat that The Daily Show has made TV a smarter entity and has, on the whole, taken aim at some very big targets in government and pop culture. But that apparently doesn’t make up for the fact that, when faced with having to interview a powerful person, Stewart supposedly backs down quite a bit more than he should.

The piece counts down what Hill has determined are just a few instances of this, including Stewart’s not ripping the heads off of Condoleezza Rice and Lynne Cheney when he had the chance and his supposed servile exaltation of David Petraeus when face-to-face with the biographer who fucked him both figuratively and literally. Hill also cites as a glaring missed opportunity to stick it to those who truly deserved it Stewart and Colbert’s 2010 Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear, which he says was little more than “a variety show marked by vacant rhetoric.” This was a pretty standard complaint from a predictable segment of the left in the wake of the rally, with those who no doubt wanted to see a 60s-style street protest full of fire-and-brimstone and piss-and-vinegar sticking out their lower lip, shoving their hands in their pockets and kicking the dirt in front of them because what they got was, well, sanity.

It’s unfortunate that this still has to be said, two-and-a-half years later, but here’s the deal with Stewart and Colbert’s attitudes about what they hoped to accomplish with their gathering: The right was always going to completely diminish and discount the Rally To Restore Sanity; it had to. So with that in mind, the people the rally was meant to appeal to were those center-left — the independents and realistic progressives — and I have to believe that those people are smart enough to know that Stewart’s point would find more accepting ears if he went out of his way to make that point expressly non-partisan. And the only way to do that was to, at least on the surface, imply that each side has amplified the rhetoric to deafening levels. The ones who understood that the right was and is doing it in far more ridiculous and pronounced ways were always going to know that one side was worse, and they were probably also well aware that Stewart knew that too. By that standard, the Rally To Restore Sanity, while not the seismic game-changer the perpetually aggrieved faction of the left demanded, was a pretty big success.

I certainly don’t mean to pick on Scott Hill specifically; I have no doubt his intentions are pure. But his piece and those like it — and there are oh so many like it — stand as the most aggravating examples of the institutional left’s complete lack of smart pragmatism when it comes to accomplishing its goals and its breathtaking lack of gratitude toward those who are helping them in immeasurable ways. Beating up on Jon Stewart — calling him a coward for not using bombast and throat-grabbing to get the progressive point across at every single turn — isn’t simply a case of perfect being the enemy of good. It’s perfect being the enemy of excellent. No one, and I mean no one, has done more to advance the liberal mindset and make it part of the popular culture these days than Stewart and The Daily Show. And Stewart’s done it by doing exactly the opposite of what those who bitch and moan about him spend so much time and effort doing: He uses sly humor, peppered with only occasional outbursts of very righteous anger, to make his beliefs and the beliefs of most progressives truly hit home. He uses sugar to help the medicine go down.

Also worth mentioning is this: If you’re trying to call Stewart out in the hope that he’ll make the changes you want and get tougher in the ways you think he should, I’ve got some really bad news for you. Jon Stewart isn’t changing shit. What he does works. He knows it and so does anyone not blinded by intransigent political ideology. Stewart doesn’t give a crap what the never-satisfied-anyway segment of the left thinks of him, nor should he.

Last week, the raving 60s throwbacks of Code Pink released a memo that they claimed was from Jon Stewart, praising them — particularly their founder Medea Benjamin, whom the “Jon Stewart” in the release described as “his friend” — and demanding more transparency from Barack Obama on the U.S.’s drone program, a favorite boogeyman of Code Pink. Anybody who knows Stewart knows that his take on Code Pink in the past has been that their antics — screeching at government meetings, producing weird puppets at confirmation hearings, and marching around in colorful papier-mâché effigies — in his own words, are “not helping.” Code Pink almost certainly issued the fake statement to get a response out of Stewart on the air, the kind of comically counterproductive activism and publicity-seeking you’d expect from them.

But what Code Pink doesn’t realize, what those who demand that Jon Stewart be more ferocious in his attacks from the left don’t seem to get, is that unlike them, Stewart’s brand of activism is effective. It actually works.

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This really is Jon Stewart at his best. Responding to the Right’s call for the poor to pay more taxes, Stewart calculates the net worth of the 50% of Americans who pay no tax at all (they own around $1.45 trillion, or 2.5% of the nation’s wealth), then asks what taking half of their wealth away  would do. The answer is of course around $700 billion – the same amount of money that would be generated if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire – and the same amount Republicans have been saying won’t make any difference to the deficit:

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By Chez Pazienza: All it took was one retweet for the wrath of God to rain down on me.

Last Friday morning I did what a lot of hacky self-proclaimed online pundits were doing in the wake of Geraldo Rivera’s galactically stupid claim that the choice to wear a hoodie is what got Trayvon Martin killed: I penned a quickie column on it for my blog.Like a lot of other ostensible progressives, however, I apparently had the bad form to not heap what I would soon learn was the universally agreed upon level of scornful indignation in Geraldo’s direction. On the contrary, while I said that Geraldo’s idiotic no-hoodie plea to American parents of brown kids was just that, idiotic, I argued that he did manage to touch on a larger issue that deserved at least some consideration. That issue is the role that someone’s wardrobe or style choices play in how that person is perceived by a large portion of the public. My point was that while I’m pretty sure Geraldo was wrong about Trayvon Martin’s hoodie having anything to do with George Zimmerman’s decision to confront and ultimately kill him, it’s common sense to note that what a person chooses to wear or adorn him or herself with influences how he or she is viewed. It may be unfair that people create preconceptions based on personal style, but that doesn’t matter one bit because that’s the way it is — and what this means is that while someone is free to wear whatever the hell he or she wants, that person has to understand that there may be unintended consequences to choosing to dress or look a certain way.

Did Geraldo Rivera have a point?

Now obviously I wasn’t saying that a kid in a hoodie deserves to be shot at for looking a little like the people Geraldo sees in stick-up surveillance videos all the time. Nor was I saying that a woman in a short skirt and high heels at a bar is asking to be sexually assaulted. I was simply arguing that while in a perfect world no one would jump to conclusions based on the way we choose to present ourselves — the key word is choice, as I’m not talking about physical characteristics that one is born with and which can’t be changed and therefore shouldn’t be judged at all on — we don’t live in a perfect world. Shouting about how a black or brown guy in a hoodie, low-slung pants and a ball cap should be able to walk the streets and not worry that people will look at him like he’s a thug and a threat is a ridiculous conceit because if you argue almost anything from the point of what should be, the whole argument becomes moot. I should be able to fly — but that’s not going to provide much consolation when I hit the sidewalk at 200 miles-an-hour. Until someone comes along and changes the reality of the situation and allows me to soar over the city, I’m gonna fall. Until someone changes perception — and I’m all for that — that perception will likely remain, and it borders on irresponsible not to be cognizant of it. Wanna buck convention? Have at it. Just understand that convention exists.

So, yeah, I dared to enter the Hysterical Indignation Vortex in the wake of the tragic and very likely criminal shooting of Trayvon Martin without expressing enough indignation to make the liberal masses happy. I know this because about ten seconds after my piece got tweeted out — admittedly by me, so I know that I get what I deserve — it was retweeted again and again and suddenly every friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend or nobody-in-particular with a Twitter account and a somewhat justifiable sense of outrage at the death of Trayvon was pounding on my digital door, ready to publicly flog me for my impertinence while basically misunderstanding every goddamned thing I’d said. Some of those raking me over the coals, in fact, admitted that they found my entire premise so “repellant” that they didn’t even bother to read the piece all the way through — not surprising given both our 140-character attention spans and blinded-by-passion discourse these days, but still a lousy way to come out on top in a debate.

And it was all of this that got me thinking about Bill Maher. Namely, that he’s right.

Last week, Maher penned an op-ed in the New York Times taking aim at how we as a culture have elevated controversy — the creation of it, often by the media, and instantaneous public response to it — to almost slapstick-comical levels. It feels like we now live to be pissed off and offended — at something, at everything, at anything — and to voice that outrage in whichever direction the perceived slight is coming from until the cause of our collective torment is beaten into submission. We don’t just disagree anymore — we want to make the thing we disagree with go away. The fury comes from both sides of the political aisle and from every stripe within our society. Maher’s assertion is that we need to learn how to get the hell over things and get on with our lives — to not immediately demand an apology every time we feel that someone has publicly offended us and to not be so quick to be offended in the first place. To those accused of saying or doing something that draws a coordinated public tantrum, his advice is simple: stop apologizing.

It pretty much goes without saying that, in a wonderfully ironic meta twist befitting the current fucked-up state of our culture, Maher’s column was debated at length in the media and throughout the social networking universe in the days after it was published. In other words, it drew controversy.

In the end, though, Maher’s right. Yes, there are a few notable exceptions to the Law of Unintended Controversy. There are times when someone can violate the standards of so many people so egregiously that a proportional public backlash is understandable. The problem is that it’s threatening to get to the point where it’s impossible to discern what is and isn’t a truly heinous and unacceptable affront because the machinery of indignation seems to wind up to the same deafening level for every perceived insult. As Jon Stewart once said brilliantly, “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.” If we react — or some large swath of us reacts — with the same fervor each time we feel like we’ve been offended, the truly offensive crap gets lost in the echo chamber.

And who decides what’s truly offensive, anyway? I get that the democratization of the media means, in theory, that only the people who are pissed off at a given slight will react and make their voices heard, but have you listened to what it’s like out there lately? After a while it all gets Cuisinarted into one dull roar — and it’s exhausting.

I’m certainly not whining about the fact that a lot of those who seem to be perpetually aggrieved unleashed their fury on me on Twitter. I put myself out there so I’m, ironically, given the nature of the subject I was writing about, asking for it. I’m also certainly not decrying social media like some antediluvian royal dismissing change from on-high. Far from it.

The point is simply that, as Bill Maher writes, if we constantly attempt to crucify those who offend our sensibilities, what we’ll inevitably be left with is a truly PC-beholden culture where no one ever says or does anything interesting. Where no one pushes boundaries. Where no one challenges us. In other words, a place where none of us, I would hope, wants to live.

We have to be able to debate and discuss without trying to decimate those who oppose us — or those who we immediately assume oppose us.

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Other than promoting America's foreign wars and attacking minorities, one of the most disgusting things Fox News engages in is non-stop propaganda for crony capitalism. In fact, you could argue that the entire point of the news network is to convince poor white Americans that they should vote against their own interests. One of the (many) ways they do this is to deify the rich. Fox news promotes millionaires and billionaires as true American heroes – self made pionneers, job creators and evil socialist fighters. Laughably, they attempt to rationalize tax cuts for the mega wealthy arguing it would't make a dent in the national debt. In this hilarious video, Jon Stewart takes the network and their claims to task, ridiculing their stomach turning pleas to end Left wing 'class warfare' and dismantling the claims that billionaires cannot help reduce the deficit:

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Chez Pazienza boils down the competing theories as to why Ron Paul is largely ignored by the mainstream media, despite his obvious popularity (Paul actually finished second in the Iow straw poll last week – a fact no one seems to recall):

There are two contradictory arguments that can be made here. One is that the amount of media attention a candidate gets can often help drive how seriously he or she is taken. In other words, if the press completely ignores someone, so does the general public; its subtle proclamation that a candidate doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The second is that if the political media are supposedly so wise to being taken for a ride, why the hell did they once again chomp on the unbelievable line of bullshit fed to them a few months back by perennial con-man Donald Trump? The easy answer is that Trump makes for great TV and a lot of page hits; Ron Paul just comes off, as Jon Stewart alluded to, like some crazy uncle you hope skips the big Thanksgiving dinner.

I actually lean towards the first argument, not because I think Paul isn’t a little crazy, but because in comparison to the other Republicans, he’s a bastion of reason and sanity. He also speaks the truth, a big no no in the corporate news world.

Generally speaking, I believe that Ron Paul’s analysis of America’s fiscal and political problems is correct – he understands that the US isn’t a free market society and engages mostly in crony capitalism, his take on the Fed is worth listening to, and he certainly doesn’t agree with American foreign policy.  However, his solutions to America’s problems are completely insane. Unadulterated free markets have proven time and time again to be disastrous, and Paul’s brand of extreme capitalism would irrepairably damage what is left of the US economy. Paul is an ideologue, and generally speaking, ideologues should be kept well away from government.

Sadly, I don’t believe the mainstream media avoids Paul because of his fiscal philosophy. More likely, they stay away from him because he tells the truth about the ridiculously corrupt monetary system they all do rather nicely out of, and doesn’t care about ridiculing the foreign wars they all helped sell to the US public.

Ron Paul’s exclusion from the main stream press isn’t about hiding Ron Paul, it’s about hiding from the truth – a battle tested speciality of the corporate media.

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If it wasn't clear before that Fox News is not a news organization and acts only as a mouthpiece for the GOP and Rupert Murdoch's financial interest, after the phone hacking scandal, it really should be. Fox News's coverage of the scandal has been, to put it mildly, hilarious. Just wait till the end of this brilliant Daily Show clip when a Fox News journalist tries to ask Murdoch about the News of the World closure – it's almost poetic:

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