I saw a few references to this clip: David Akin pointed to it on CAJ-L, as did the PastPeak blog -- among many others.

But I'll add my voice to the chorus: It was a remarkably honest dialogue  -- well, one way, at least -- between Daily Show host Jon Stewart with Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson of CNN's Crossfire.

"I thought you were going to be funny," Carlson said at one point.

"No, I'm not going to be your monkey," was Stewart's rejoinder.

I accessed the clip at contemporaryinsanity.org.It said: 920 GB have been sent as of 1:30 a.m. EST 10-17-2004! That's a whole lot of Jon Stewart! That's also an expensive server bill, I suspect. The host is asking for donations if you download or view the clips. Please consider helping him out.

With that out of the way ...

Unless you lived in Saskatchewan in the early 1990s or attended a John Sawatzky interviewing course, you might miss the source for this anecdote, but CBC-TV supper hour anchor Costa Maragos -- who is a really nice guy and who has done tons of great interviews -- was once interviewing John Candy.

Candy was of course a comedian and actor (SCTV, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, etc.) who died relatively young of a heart attack.

But Candy was speaking to Maragos in his role as a businessman and co-owner of the CFL's Toronto Argonauts (this was in the days the CFL had expanded into the U.S.), which is not to be confused with his William B. persona.

Maragos didn't pick up on that. He tried to do the funny thing, and it just didn't work. Candy didn't want to play. He wanted to talk football.

Similarly, Begala and Carlson thought they would be talking to Smart-Alecky Jon.

However, Serious Jon wanted to make an appearance.

"I'm here to confront you, because we need help from the media, and you're ... h-u-urting us," he told them.

When Begala defended his show as a debate, Stewart said that was like calling pro wrestling an athletic competition.

"I think you're a good comedian. I think your lectures are boring," said Carlson, the bow-tied one.

"This is theatre," Stewart said. "You're doing theatre when you should be doing debate. What you're doing is part of partisan hackery."

Stewart went further: "You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you have failed miserably ..."

On top of accusing him of being a boring lecturer, Carlson then impugned Stewart's abilities as a dinner guest.

"Welcome back to Crossfire. We're talking to Jon Stewart, who is lecturing us on our moral inferiority," was how Carlson opened the segment after the commercial break.

An attempt by Carlson to get Stewart to respond with a joke to the Bill O'Reilly vibrator story (host of Fox News's O'Reilly Factor; there is no such story), fell flat.

"Where's your moral outrage on this," Stewart asked evenly. "I don't have any," Carlson said with a brief snicker. "I know," Stewart said, and there was no mistaking the edge in his tone.

The whole segment, as the Daily Show might have described it, was a moment of Zen.

To my mind, anger and pain are two of the great driving forces in comedy. I suspect Stewart's show is driven substantially by the former when it comes to how it perceives the role of the media in the American political process.

Unfortunately, from that CNN clip, you get the sense that Stewart may be tragically miscast; he's Will Durst when he really wants to be Ted Koppel.

If he thinks Begala/Carlson/CNN do a shitty job, then why not leave the Daily Show behind and reinvent himself as a serious journalist?

Now, the question becomes: Does the public want to watch what Jon Stewart himself would not only like to see on TV, but thinks is essential to see?

Fox News is a huge success in U.S. television news. It's not thriving on journalistic values. What it offers is high-testosterone conservative entertainment, if not out-and-out propaganda (I saw Outfoxed Saturday at a Media Democracy Day event in Toronto).

And to a certain extent, that's the nature of the medium. Television works best when there's fireworks, not reasoned but boring debate.

Stewart wants reasoned debate on TV; he just doesn't want to do it himself. Begala and Carlson are so robotic and obtuse that they believe they are doing debate.

And the same public that likely cheers Stewart on when he scolds Begala and Carlson would probably flip around to something more entertaining if their hero was just delivering trenchant insights and not witty bon mots (impress the hell out of me and name the Simpsons reference!).

Must sleep.