"If there's one thing everybody can agree on, it's that...they hate the press"

Great article in today's NYT on satire-based news that has a lot of remarks supportive of yesterday's rant on objectivity.

"This is big because there is this gigantic imbalance and something has got to fill it," said the cultural critic Neal Gabler, who is obsessed with "The Daily Show." "Young people get the attitude, the deflationary truth-telling attitude of these shows because they can't find it elsewhere," he said.

This is one of the primary reasons that reporting style has to change. However, here's where we have some work to do. All of the news satire programs and publications work in the context that they are all satire (save for the clumsy "Week that Was" tagged onto Prime Time Live). How do we bring a wise, winking look to the news and still cover everything that needs to be covered. John Stewart doesn't do bits on disabled folks trying to live on their own.?That's a story that needs to be told -- how do we signal when we're being serious? Perhaps the answer lies in the writing style of a Jim Schutze: often funny, often moving, but always reverent.

Asked about the politics of writers for "The Daily Show," Ben Karlin, the executive producer, insisted, "We have no agenda other than holding on to our cushy, high-paying, basic cable jobs."

That's one of the reasons that news with personality, be that satire or politics, is much more honest than so-called "objective news."

As for the Pew study crediting shows like his for teaching a fifth of young Americans about politics, Mr. Karlin said he was dubious. For one thing, he said, the audience could not possibly get the jokes if it did not already know the news stories that were being spoofed. "People are getting their news from the tops of taxi cabs, from sluglines on Yahoo and from accidentally stopping on CNN," he said.

This illustrates one of the biggest problems of daily newspapers. If you think for one nanosecond that you're the only outlet through which your customers are getting news, you have just hit a death-accelerating mudslide?on the inevitable?march to extinction.

The?architecture of the modern newspaper is built on a foundational? belief that today's pack of pulp is the only means by which the citizenry may be informed. That means being everything to everyone; that means carrying a lot of national and international news stories that only a quarter of your readers will look at; that means running condescending, paternalistic, toothless "how to live your life" features.

So the question begged is this:

What information can?we deliver that no one else can?