It hurts more when it's true

Jon Stewart's recent demolition of a panel of magazine industry stuffed shirts in New York was probably deserved. It was reported by Simon Houpt on Monday in the Globe and Mail (regrettably, subscription required).

If you have enjoyed the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, like me your recurring question is why anyone would agree to sit down with him or his team given what invariably happens. Didn't it occur to anyone that the pompous topic (Laughing Matters: Magazines Celebrate Humour) provided just the right platform, with editors from Time, Vanity Fair, Men's Health and Cosmopolitan sitting there as fat targets?

Time did give a reporter's notes to the government. Consumer magazines are quite often shameless shills for the commercial interests. Obvious targets. But what caused a lot of seat squirming and was perhaps the most wounding remark was that Stewart dismissed magazines and the print industry as irrelevant. When Graydon Carter, one of the roastees and Editor of Vanity Fair, attempted a defence, saying that magazines break stories that TV rips off, Stewart agreed: "I didn't say you don't have your place. I said you're at the children's table."

Ouch. Even from the master of "fake news" that's hard to take, particularly when there is so much evidence that it is true.