It has become so routine that we expect it as part of the mainstream media landscape: A serious, highly prestigious media outlet devotes laudatory attention to the Comedy Central television program "The Daily Show," and just about every journalist nods in agreement.

The latest big instance came in the mid-month Sunday edition of The New York Times. The spread took up the equivalent of more than two full broadsheet pages, starting with a color photo of Jon Stewart that filled nearly half the cover page of the newspaper's "Arts & Leisure" section.

Why the adulation? Well, for starters, the program's satire is often very funny. It's well researched, it jumps on the news of the day, and it draws blood with slashing sharp attacks of a sort rarely seen in U.S. mass media.

Yet, while news accounts are apt to note how many viewers hold faux "news anchor" Stewart in higher esteem as a journalist than the "real" ones at the top of the media pack, there's a sheepish quality to much of the coverage about "The Daily Show."

The program "has earned a devoted following that regards the broadcast as both the smartest, funniest show on television and a provocative and substantive source of news," eminent Times critic Michiko Kakutani writes in the Aug. 17 Times feature.

Consider the subtexts of this paragraph in the story: "Mr. Stewart describes his job as 'throwing spitballs' from the back of the room and points out that 'The Daily Show' mandate is to entertain, not inform. Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day — 'the stuff we find most interesting,' as he said in an interview at the show's Midtown Manhattan offices, the stuff that gives them the most 'agita,' the sometimes somber stories he refers to as his 'morning cup of sadness.' And they've done so in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious."

Well, OK. That says a lot about "The Daily Show." But what does it say about the "real" news media — and especially about the most important and self-important huge media outlets that dispense the news with enormous ripple effects across the news terrain?

If, as The New York Times soberly reports in the article, "straight news programs cannot" tackle the "big issues of the day" while "speaking truth to power," we should ask a key question: Why not?

But this is not a question that outlets like the Times seem interested in pursuing to any depth. Contrasts with the mainstream corporate media are primarily rendered to underscore the uniqueness and extraordinary qualities of "The Daily Show." The Comedy Central hit is in the spotlight, and the vast rest of the media are the arrays of darkness that make it so conspicuous.

A reality missing from such fawning coverage of "The Daily Show" by big media is that the elaborate praise for Jon Stewart and his colleagues is apt to be a tacit form of convoluted self-loathing — in professional terms, anyway — among the likes of, say, top-tier Times journalists. Their own outlet is so circumscribed and so lumbering in its daily incarnation that at some level they can only be amazed and perhaps a bit envious at the meaning-freighted antics of "The Daily Show."

Well, that's the way it goes in medialand. What's conspicuous is notable, but what isn't conspicuous is apt to be insidious. The wallpaper of the media edifice can be passably good at looking backward — examining some aspects of propaganda for the Iraq invasion, for instance, well after it occurs — while now helping to mesmerize the country into escalation of the war in Afghanistan. But let's not quibble. Everybody has a job to do.

Norman Solomon is the author of "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." The book has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name.

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