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Ironically, even as George W. Bush has frequently positioned himself in opposition to the Hollywood elite and liberal journalists, he might be considered our first pop culture president.  According to Stephen Humphries of the Christian Science Monitor, the media has shaped his image and legacy to an unprecedented degree — and not to his advantage: The [...]

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You don’t believe it?  Well, as Keillor himself points out, it’s not any more of a leap of logic than what the Republicans are trying to do: It is a bold move on the Republicans’ part — forget about the past, it’s only history, so write a new narrative and be who you want to be [...]

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Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times wonders at — rather than analyzes — the sea change that has made “Pop TV” the new favorite venue for politicians. With all the recent appearances by the President, candidates and their spouses on everything from “Deal or No Deal” to the “Colbert Report,” Stanley notes, “It’s hard [...]

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The return of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to the airwaves tonight is bittersweet -- but pretty much just sweeeet.

Yes, the Writer's Guild of America (WGA), who are on strike, will be picketing both shows -- and they are certainly justified. The WGA's grievances with the media industry are clear and undeniable.

But we really need some quality satire these days. To cite just one example, someone has got to start mocking all this rhetoric of change.

Julie Bosman of The New York Times reveals that fans of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are not the idiots we thought we were. They even read:

The Comedy Central audience is more serious than its reputation allows. The public may still think of the "Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" audience as a group of sardonic slackers, Gen-Y college students who prefer YouTube to print. But publishers say it's a much more diverse demographic -- and more important, a book-buying audience.

"It's the television equivalent of NPR," Ms. Levin, of Free Press, said. "You have a very savvy, interested audience who are book buyers, people who do go into bookstores, people who are actually interested in books."

While those demographics might not come as a surprise to people who recognize that political comedy based on often subtle irony requires intelligent engagement, it's still worth noting how few places in American culture cultivate that type of viewer/reader:

Television programs that devote significant attention to serious authors have practically gone the way of the illuminated manuscript, publishers lament.

But the Comedy Central shows are also becoming extremely competitive for publicists placing their authors. After a "Daily Show" appearance, several publishers said, the author's Amazon ranking rises and the daily sales figures "pop," in industry parlance. It is not at all unusual, one book publicist said, for a title to go from a 300,000 rank to a spot in the Top 300 -- not often the case after shows like "Charlie Rose."

"The 1/2-Hour News Hour" has a great name -- but that is where most of the laughs end, unfortunately.

Having outed myself again and again as a blue-state-liberal-lefty-commie, one might presume I'd have no interest in a conservative counterpart to "The Daily Show" (on Fox News, no less!). But actually, it's all good.

Quality satire is in itself revolutionary -- no matter what is being satirized. So if conservatives can do it well, I think the world will be a better place.

But "The 1/2-Hour News Hour" (created by Joel Surnow of "24" fame, by the way) misses the mark, most of the time. The jokes often lack purpose or direction -- and they are frequently dated, as if conservatives have been saving up this humor for decades.

Hillary Clinton will be staffing her new administration with "angry lesbians." Barack Obama is too popular. The ACLU is evil for supporting neo-Nazis' right to assembly. It feels too often like you are stuck in the last lame half-hour of the recent incarnations of "Saturday Night Live."

Maybe the funniest aspect of the new conservative show is that many of its best moments tend to be politically neutral -- or even liberal. Its criticism of Iranian anti-Semitism is spot-on (the Iranian government is denying that a Holocaust-denial conference ever occurred), and its attempts to mock children's books supporting gay partnerships actually turned into a satire, perhaps unintentional, of conservative book-banning tendencies.

Say what you want about Jon Stewart. His show, at the very least, has a sense of urgency -- and it knows that effective satire requires that you have a point.