What Battered Newsrooms Can Learn From Stewart's CNBC Takedown

Jon Stewart's epic, eight-minute takedown of CNBC's clueless, in-the-tank reporting most talked-about journalism of this week. You can quibble about Stewart's motives in undertaking the piece, but you can't argue with the results. The piece wasn't just the laugh-out-loud funniest thing on TV all week, but it was exquisitely reported, insightful, and it tapped into America's real anger about the financial crisis in a way that mainstream journalism has found so elusive all these months, in a time when we all need to be tearing down myths. As one commenter on the Romenesko blog noted, "it's simply pathetic that one has to watch a comedy show to see things like this." But that's not all. The Stewart piece also got the kind of eyeballs that most newsrooms would kill for in this digital age.

Some take-aways:

1) Great research trumps good access to the powerful;

2) The American public is mad as hell right now, so why isn't the mainstream media?;

3) Tear down this wall... of pretending that the media itself isn't a major player in American society; and

4) The First Amendment doesn't say anything about not being funny, or not being passionate.