Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity last weekend leveled some sharp barbs at the media's "perpetual panic conflict-inator." Some in the media, naturally enough, didn't take kindly to being blamed for exacerbating the nation's problems. Count MSNBC's anchors among those irked with Stewart. The rally, in their view, seemed to portray the network as a progressive equivalent to Fox News. On TV, Chris Matthews criticized aspects of the rally, and his colleague Keith Olbermann wrote that Stewart had "jumped the shark."
Interestingly, Olbermann did take some of Stewart's criticisms in stride. While he firmly disputed the "false equivalence" between MSNBC and Fox News, he conceded that the overall message of the rally that the "tone needs to change" was not lost on him. In that spirit, he decided to "unilaterally" suspend the agitated "Worst Persons in the World" segment because "its satire and whimsy have gradually gotten lost in some anger." Olbermann also a wondered if "anybody else on TV--or radio--will do something similar."
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Erik Hayden
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