In his new role as a political leader, which is what you call somebody if he hosts a rally on the Washington Mall for over 200,000 people, Jon Stewart was a little hemmed at the Rally to Restore Sanity on Saturday. Because sanity should know no party, partisan rhetoric was not on the teleprompter.  So instead the host of “The Daily Show” took steady aim on the one American institution that everyone can agree to hate: The Media. Within the first minute of his deft, very articulate stump speech at the end of the rally, Mr. Stewart turned his gun sights on the, um, fake news, which he called, “the country’s 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator,” which, he added, “did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder.”  “The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous, flaming ant epidemic,” he said, to roars of approval from the crowd.  It was a beautiful day on the Mall, and who doesn’t like kicking the press around, but speaking of ants, media bias and hyperbole seem like pretty small targets when unemployment is near 10 percent, vast amounts of unregulated cash are being spent in the election’s closing days, and no American governing institution — not the Senate, not the House of Representatives, not even the Supreme Court — seems to be above petty partisan bickering. Mr. Stewart couldn’t really go there and instead suggested it was those guys over there in the press tent who had the blood of democracy on their hands.  Distrust of the media was laid down throughout the rally by video montages of ranting broadcast bobble heads. Even with the vast gulf between their faux respective beliefs, Mr. Stewart and his co-host, Stephen Colbert, found common ground in the failings of the press. Mr. Colbert awarded some media outlets a medal for helping keep fear alive; Mr. Stewart gave out his awards to average Americans who go about their business every day in lives built on compromise and comity.  “We work together to get things done every damn day! The only place we don’t is here,” he said, gesturing toward the Capitol, “or on cable TV.”  It’s a compelling, sharply delivered critique that went down well on the Mall and on television, all amid a forest of hilarious signs and some pretty funny stuff that preceded it.  Gabriel Snyder, formerly of Newsweek and Gawker, said on Twitter, “the Rally to Restore Sanity turns out to be history’s largest act of press criticism.” My colleague Brian Stelter was in the press tent in Washington and described a hilarious scene in which some of the attendees, blocked by the crush from seeing the event, watched the monitors from the doorway of the press tent, laughing and applauding over the shoulders of the suddenly quiet people sitting there.  But here’s the problem: Most Americans don’t watch or pay attention to cable television. In even a good news night, about five million people take a seat on the cable wars, which is less than 2 percent of all Americans. People are scared of what they see in their pay envelopes and neighborhoods, not because of what Keith Olbermann said last night or how Bill O’Reilly came back at him.  “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing,” Mr. Stewart said, and then went on to say, “not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate,” he said.  All due respect to Mr. Williams and Mr. Sanchez, not many people know or care who they are.  True, any poll of American attitudes toward the press would suggest a lot of people share Mr. Stewart’s distrust of media, and if they had a Rally to Restore Respect for the Media, it would draw two people. And one of them would be a hot dog vendor.  True also that the pushback by the news media here and elsewhere is predictable. On the day of the rally, James Poniewozik of Time magazine said, “don’t be surprised to see some defensive media responses to the critiques over the next few days.”  It’s not as if this is a new theme for Mr. Stewart, who first stepped out of comic character to build a withering assault on the “Crossfire” shouters back in 2004. On Saturday, he returned to media-induced pathology: “The media is like our immune system. If it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker — or perhaps eczema.”  But personally, I enjoy Mr. Stewart in his regular seat where he is less reasonable, less interested in obvious targets and less willing to suggest that all political ideas and movements are like kindergartners, worthy of understanding and respect if only the media would get out of the way. His barrage against the news media Saturday stemmed from the fact that, on this day, attacking the message would have been bad manners, so he stuck with the messengers.
At his Rally to Restore Sanity, Jon Stewart was unwilling to take a stand in the culture wars. So he opened fire on a bystander: the news media.