The clearest sign of the political cowardice and intellectual impotence of liberal America is its collective worship of Jon Stewart. Once upon a time, The Daily Show was probably funny – that’s presumably why it appears on Comedy Central. But Stewart long ago turned into the Oprah Winfrey for urban hipsters, his self-appointment as the arbiter-in-chief of smirking moderation masking a profoundly reactionary worldview.

Stewart is reaping accolades this week for his handling on Monday night of the shooting in Arizona that left six people (including a judge) dead, and fourteen people wounded, most notably the Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. However, by focusing on “the media,” Stewart is playing right into Republican hands.

Canada’s largest newspaper chain has published a “retraction and apology” to billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Asreported in Mediaite last Thursday, Canada’s CTV News reported that  Soros was suing Sun Media for defamation. On Saturday, The Toronto Sun published a “Retraction and apology to George Soros,” pertaining to a column written by columnist Ezra Levant and published in the [...]

Billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros has long been a controversial figure, but it seems sometimes enough is enough. According to Canada’s CTV News, Soros is suing Canadian media conglomerate Quebecor for defamation over a column written by company Vice President Kory Teneycke, which called the civic advocacy organization Avaaz “an American special interest group funded by U.S. billionaire George Soros.”

Canada has a bad habit of taking the worst elements of American media and making versions that are, surprisingly, even worse. One thing we’ve mostly managed to avoid, though, is the segregation of the news media into hyper-partisan factions of poisoned “truthiness.”

All of that changed this summer when one of the Canada’s largest media conglomerates, Quebecor Media, appointed Kory Teneycke to the position of Vice President, Development, and charged him with midwifing the birth of SunTV News, a new cable news channel that would compete with the established offerings from the CBC and CTV. And all of that changed yesterday, when Teneycke had one of the most spectacular falls from grace in Canadian media history.

Last week’s spat between the rapper M.I.A. (born Maya Arulpragasam) and New York Times writer Lynn Hirschberg was as entertaining as it was nasty. But it is worth noting their vitriolic little two-step is actually the result a deep moral agreement. That is, both M.I.A. and Hirschberg buy into one of the most harmful cultural [...]

You have to feel bad for Oprah Winfrey. It can’t be any fun having someone publish a tell-all book claiming that you have abused drugs, exaggerated stories about being raised poor, and perhaps made up the one about being sexually abused as a child.

This decade, what changed everything was the development of what has been called “Web 2.0″, the collection of web-based applications that foster interactivity, modular interoperability and collaboration. These include social networking sites, wikis, aggregators, and blogs, along with dozens of other applications that allow people to share and revise content at will. This is what underwrites the open-source, multiple-drafts, reuse/remix/recycle media ecosystem we might as well call Culture 2.0.