From Laura Bush to "The Daily Show"

Here's an excellent piece by Frank Rich detailing fairly comprehensively how low the U.S. news media have gone. The opinion piece, appearing in Sunday's New York Times, kicks off with Laura Bush's already infamous horse masturbation story about her husband at the sick annual junket aka the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. Using this news peg to rightly castigate the mostly useless news media and the White House Press Corps (partially excepting NBC's David Gregory) for their sins, he hits home by pointing to a rare bright spot for news in corporate media-land:

Much as we all delight in the latest horse-milking joke, the happiest news in comedy last week was the announcement that "The Daily Show" will be spinning off a new half-hour on Comedy Central starring its "senior White House correspondent," Stephen Colbert. Make no mistake about it: the ratings rise of Jon Stewart's fake news has been in direct relation to the show's prowess at blowing the whistle on propaganda when the legitimate press fails to do so. The correspondents' dinner, itself a "Daily Show" target last week, could not have been a more graphic illustration of why, at a time when trust in real news is plummeting, there's a bull market for fake news that can really be trusted to know what is fake. [My italics]

And btw, I didn't realize that the Drudge Report was exactly ten years old. Happy Birthday, Matt Drudge . . . or not.