Where post-American cattle go for their current-events edification

Kevin Williamson at NRO takes down Jon Stewart with the characteristic incisiveness that has made him one of my favorite contemporary opinion writers:

Mr. Stewart is the leading voice of the half-bright Left because he is a master practitioner of the art of half-bright vitriolic denunciation. His intellectual biography is that of a consummate lightweight — a William and Mary frat boy who majored in psychology, which must have been a disappointment to his father, a professor of physics — and his comedy career has been strictly by-the-numbers, from the early days on the New York City comedy-club scene to changing his name (Mr. Stewart began life as Mr. Leibowitz) and a career-boosting stint on MTV, where he was second only toBeavis and Butt-Head in the ratings. He subsequently may have matched Beavis and Butt-Head’s popularity, but he has never risen to comparable heights of social insight.

[snip]

 Fans, many of whom cannot quite spell his name, swear that the program is “more accurate than any other news show.” Ignore, for the moment, the judgment exhibited in that quotation and focus on the word “other.” In the minds of many of his admirers — and in the minds of those news-site editors who report on Mr. Stewart’s fake news as part of the real news — there is no substantive difference between what Mr. Stewart does and what, e.g., Ezra Klein does (“Ezra Klein Destroys Romney,” “Ezra Klein Destroys David Brooks,” “Ezra Klein Destroys Republican Opposition to Temporary Payroll Tax Cut,” etc.) because for the Left the point of journalism is not to criticize politics or to analyze politics but to be a servant of politics, to “destroy” such political targets as may be found in one’s crosshairs. For the Left, the maker of comedy and the maker of graphs perform the same function. It does not matter who does the “destroying,” so long as it gets done.

“Destroying” is more of an aspiration than a reality, of course. If Megyn Kelly has been destroyed by anybody, she is not showing any sign of it. What it communicates is the Left’s politics of vilification, a longstanding preference that has recently become extremely pronounced, substituting a good-guys-and-bad-guys narrative for the discussion of complex ideas. Mr. Klein, for all his empiricist posturing, is very much a practitioner of that shallow art — writing, among other things, that a Democratic opponent of the Affordable Care Act was “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” (Shockingly, I was unable to locate a headline reading: “Ezra Klein Destroys Joe Lieberman.”)

I know people who fit Williamson's category - that is, Stewart is really and truly their main news source.

Which makes commitment to facts and principles a moral imperative.