Jon Stewart Knocks ‘Lamestream’ Obsession With ‘America’s Tweetheart’ Sarah Palin

As is often the case, Daily Show host Jon Stewart got to have his cake and eat it too last night, mocking former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin‘s Twitter feed, while simultaneously lampooning the “lamestream media’s” coverage of that very same stream of 140-character consciousness. While he makes some canny observations about Palin’s misguided comparison of Wikileaks to her legal battle with Gawker, his media critique ignores an important driver of the “utter fascination” with America’s Tweetheart: the consumer.

To be fair, Stewart spends a lot more time in this segment taking Palin’s tweets apart than criticizing the media, but that makes it all the more contradictory a sidenote: (from Comedy Central)

several Palin headlines. The accelerants that fuel the Palin bonfire (sex appeal, lightning-rod politics, antagonism and idol-worship in almost equal measure) are no mystery, but I think its scale eludes most casual observers.

Over the past three years, I’ve seen a lot of subjects blow up in the media, and the trend has been toward shorter, but brighter, bursts. Some, like Balloon Boy, are nuclear-hot for a short time, and are never heard from again. Others, like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, heat up occasionally, and are reliable traffic Sterno the rest of the time.

Palin is another story entirely. Her default setting is “nuclear reactor core,” but a good Palin post is like a napalm run on the surface of the sun. Case in point: Palin’s recent “North Korea” gaffe.

Now, Palin receives more than her fair share of ridicule (some of it deserved, some of it not), but this was a relatively innocuous slip of the tongue, buoyed only slightly by poorly-sourced allegations from the book Game Change. It didn’t have the obscene punch of Joe Biden‘s “Big f**kin’ deal,” or the cultural resonance of Glenn Beck’s “Obama has a a deep-seated hatred for white people.”

It went nuclear, all the same, even though, as Media Matters points out, the gaffe was ignored by many mainstream outlets. The traffic on that piece was unbelievable, and it bespoke a hunger for Palin that has a life of its own. I would venture a guess that the ratio of Palin detractors to supporters who read that story was a lot more even than you might suspect.

That’s part of Palin’s magic. A report that portrays Palin negatively is as likely to be linked and ridiculed by her supporters as it is to be forwarded around by her detractors, and vice-versa.  There doesn’t seem to be anything that diminishes the Palin effect. As long as people are buying Sarah Palin, the “lamestream media,” and Jon Stewart, will continue to sell.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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