Whenever I read a Twitter, part of me wonders if the person who sent it has any actual work to do. Jon Stewart, cohosting Comedy Central's election-night coverage, wondered the same thing about cohost Stephen Colbert.
♦ You weren't the only one who stayed up to watch election results. Brad Pitt and Oprah watched the festivities from Grant Park in Chicago. Harvey Weinstein had a party at Public House attended by James Franco, Josh Lucas and Jessica Alba. Robin Williams and Billy Crystal watched Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert live. And in LA, Courteney Cox and David Arquette hosted an Obama victory party attended by Jennifer Aniston, John Mayer and Sacha Baron Cohen, among others. [R&M, E!]
♦ Star is standing by its Jennifer Aniston pregnancy story. The mag claims she's undergoing fertility treatments so she can get pregnant by her 40th birthday in February. [Star]
♦ Are Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes planning to have another baby? [OK!]
Neocon Times columnist Bill Kristol was of course acting smug and cute last night on the Daily Show, since that's basically his gig: Smarmy right-wing fish in left wing ponds. But he just didn't seem to have it in him to truly bait the other side. He declared John McCain would triumph on Tuesday but, wait, ha ha, it's just a joke of the make-a-Daily Show-audience-heckle-me variety, and Kristol admitted as much (and did succeed in getting booed).
Sure, it was kind of a McCarthyite move by freshman Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, calling Barack Obama "anti-American" on MSNBC's Hardball. But you know what else it was? A chance for editors across the country to gleefully brandish their pattern-matching skills and knowledge of Canadian classic rock. Hence all of the references to Bachman-Turner Overdrive (hits: "Takin' Care of Business," "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet") in the screenshots above, all courtesy Eric Spiegelman. As usual, the Daily Show adds that extra dash of awesome.
♦ Barack Obama locked up 17 newspaper endorsements over the weekend compared to just two for John McCain. [E&P]
♦ John McCain will make an appearance on Letterman on Thursday. [CNN]
♦ Don't mention the recession to Tina Brown: Her new site will burn through $18 mil. over the next three years and most staffers are making more than 100K. [AdAge]
♦ Is the tween magazine over? [AdFreak]
♦ Jon Stewart's Daily Show is heading to the Middle East. [THR]
Albert Hammond Jr. and Agyness Deyn walking their dog in the East Village ... Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber riding around on a Vespa in SoHo and later walking with their son to a bookstore ... Jon Stewart and his wife pushing their kids in strollers ... Julianne Moore getting a parking ticket in the West Village ... Taylor Momsen and Leighton Meester filming Gossip Girl on the Upper East Side ... Sarah Jessica Parker walking son James to school ... Emma Watson walking with an unidentified guy ... Kate Winslet running to keep up with her son ... Marc Jacobs and Lorenzo Martone holding hands on a walk in the West Village ...
♦ Michael Phelps is telling people he's single even though he's actually dating Miss California runner-up Nicole Johnson. [R&M]
♦ Peter Cook's interview with Barbara Walters airs on Friday, but Christie Brinkley's lawyers now say he violated a confidentiality agreement by speaking with the network. [OK!, ABC News]
♦ Hugh Hefner says his relationship with Holly Madison began to crumble six months ago when they found out his sperm count was too low to father any kids. Also, he's already auditioning new girlfriends. [E!]
♦ Anna Wintour's latest celebrity obsession? Gerard Butler. [P6]
♦ Not surprisingly, ratings for SNL this past weekend exceeded expectations. Some 10 million people tuned in for Tina Fey's Sarah Palin skit. [WSJ, THR]
♦ Michelle Obama will appear on Jon Stewart on Wednesday. [HuffPo]
♦ Beverly Hills Chihuahua took the top spot at the weekend box office with $29 million. [Mojo]
♦ Joe Hagan takes a long look at the Times-owning Sulzbergers in this week's issue of New York. [NYM]
♦ AdAge has released its list of the 10 best magazines. [AdAge]
♦ Campbell Brown is working out nicely for CNN: Ratings are substantially higher than they were for Paula Zahn and she's beating Keith Olbermann most nights, too. [NYT]
♦ Ratings for Desperate Housewives continue to decline. [TVDecoder]
♦ HBO's Entourage has been renewed for a sixth season. [THR]
Jon Stewart had Gawker's favorite public intellectual Peggy Noonan on The Daily Show last night for a chat that was remarkably civil considering the fact that he spent the whole time systematically undermining pretty much everything Peggy Noonan has written over the past few weeks about Sarah Palin and her virtuous small-town "Nation of Wasillas" blame the rape victim values. "New York is just like hundreds of Wasillas, packed into the same building!" he pointed out. Then he made a big show of saying "bullshit." Just like Peggy did that one time! The best part is the end when Peggy gets all solemn and says of America "Don't bet against us." Ha ha ha, we might if the SEC hadn't outlawed it!
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the most trusted names in journalism, sat down for a Q&A with Entertainment Weekly—and kicked everyone's asses all the time! For example: STEPHEN COLBERT: One of the things I love about my character is I can make vast declarations and it doesn't matter if I'm wrong. I love being wrong. So my character can tell you exactly what's going to happen: The Democrats are going to change everything. We're going to have gay parents marrying their own gay babies. Obama's gonna be sworn in on a gay baby. The oath is gonna end ''So help me, gay baby.'' More selections after the jump. So what do you think is the issue that people will end up voting on? STEWART: Whatever happens that week. It all depends on when that Michelle Obama ''I hate whitey'' tape comes out. If it comes out now, it could dissipate by the election. But if it comes out a couple days before, that could be dangerous. COLBERT: Jon? I have it. There are a lot of issues in this election. The biggest one right now is the economy. STEWART: We were in this huge credit crisis, out of money. Then the Fed goes, We'll give you a trillion dollars, and all of a sudden Wall Street is like, ''I can't believe we got away with it!'' Can you imagine if someone said, ''I shouldn't have bought that sports car because it means I can't have my house,'' and the bank just said, ''All right, you can have your house. And you know what? Keep the car.'' [He throws up his arms joyfully and shouts] ''Yeaaaaah, I get to keep the car! Wait, do I have to give the money back?'' ''No, it doesn't matter.'' ''Yeah, I'm gonna get another car! I'm gonna do the same thing the same way, except twice as fucked up!'' COLBERT: The idea that Lehman Brothers doesn't get any money and AIG does reminds me very much of ''Iran is a mortal enemy because they have not achieved a nuclear weapon. But North Korea is a country we can work with, because they have a nuclear weapon.'' The idea is, Get big or go home. How big can you fuck up? Can you fuck up so bad that you would ruin the world economy? If it's just 15,000 who are out of jobs, no. You have to actually be a global fuck up to get any help. Can any [politician] break through this mess? STEWART: I worry that those people are there, but we won't recognize them — or we'll destroy them so thoroughly that their voice won't be heard. I just imagine Lincoln out there, and people throwing the gay stuff at him. ''And what about depression running in his family?'' ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You guys regularly make a mockery of the 24-hour news networks. Do you see anything good about the format? JON STEWART: It's Muzak now. You ever walk into a clothing store in New York City and they're not playing music? And you go, ''What's going on here? Did a virus hit? This doesn't seem right.'' Twenty-four-hour news now is this weird companion to my life. STEPHEN COLBERT: There's not more news now than there was when we were kids. There's the same amount from when it was just Cronkite. And the easiest way to fill it is to have someone's opinion on it. Then you have an opposite opinion, and then you have a mishmash of fact and opinion, and you leave it the least informed you can possibly be. STEWART: We've got three financial networks on all day. The bottom falls out of the credit market, and they were all running around. On CNBC I saw a guy talking to eight people in [eight different onscreen] boxes, and they were all like, ''I don't know!'' It'd be like if Hurricane Ike hit, and you put on the Weather Channel, and they were yelling, ''I don't know what the fuck is going on! I'm getting wet and it's windy and I don't know why and it's making me sad! Maybe the president could come down and put up some sort of windscreen?'' By being on 24 hours a day, you begin to not be able to tell what's salient anymore. Read the whole interview here.
At right is that horribly tasteless New Yorker cover from a few months back, and at left is Entertainment Weekly's new parody cover. There's faux conservopundit Stephen Colbert, dressed as a smirking Michelle "Angela Davis" Obama, terrorist fist-bumping with his old Daily Show boss Jon Stewart, who is clad in Islamobama gear. It's a well-executed (if a tad late) little bit of satire, and an example of just how thoroughly this endless horse race of an election has seeped its way into our idea of "entertainment." Click for (slightly) larger.
After giving short shrift to Barack Obama on two major broadcast TV shows Tuesday, Bill Clinton could hardly mention the Democratic presidential candidate's name enough on the basic cable Daily Show Wednesday. Perhaps comedian Chris Rock's well-aimed barbs in Clinton's wake on Late Show With David Letterman got through to the ex-president. But when host Jon Stewart brought up the Letterman incident, Clinton said Rock and other critics miss the point.
Last year's Emmy Awards hit a 17-year ratings low. The prizes themselves mostly go to TV shows no one watches, so you'd think organizers would eagerly seek other ways to spice up the telecast. But the hot topic of the moment, celebrity magazine covergirl and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, was off limits to speakers, according to red-carpet reports of a ban on political speech. The Wall Street crash wasn't brought up much either. That left celebrities confined to making veiled, mostly boring references to current events. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert made the best of the situation. Click the video icon to watch.
Cable news is a hyper-competitive environment full of huge egos fighting with each other for every scrap of a ratings point. And at this time of year, with all the shouting heads descending upon the political convention like a gang of ferrets into a small sack, conflict is inevitable. Plus it's hot, and there's not too much real news anyhow, so everyone is grumpy. After the jump, an illustrated guide to the most vicious feuds in the cable world. Pick your side, demonize your enemies, and play along:
It has been months now since Fox News' PR machine issued one of its trademark slams of a critic, and we, for one, are happy that they have come off their summer vacations and gone back to work. The target this time: Jon Stewart, darling funnyman of the liberal elite. Surprise! The best part about this new spat: the person who comes off looking worst of all is not Stewart, nor Fox's flack, but rather the Washington Post's vacuous conventional media wisdom purveyor Howie Kurtz. A fight to admire, and a symptom of increased media fragmentation and public alienation! A full recap: The Democratic convention is such a news-bereft wasteland that Stewart was apparently giving a press conference, consisting of him riffing to a roomful of eager reporters. During the course of this, he said that Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan is "the biggest 'fuck you' to people with brains that I've ever seen in my life" and that Chris Wallace is the network's only legit anchor, and that Fox is biased against Obama. Stop the fucking presses, right? But Howie Kurtz, trooper that he is, put in a call to Fox, and came back with this paragraph for his story:
Ryan Seacrest preparing to board a helicopter at the Chelsea heliport ... Michael Lohan catching a flight at LaGuardia ... Mario Cantone walking through the Village ... Aubrey O'Day and Ashley Parker Angel signing autographs outside their Broadway show ... Rufus Wainwright walking near Lincoln Center ... Mary Louise Parker walking with her kids downtown ... Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes heading inside Lincoln Center to catch a show ... Ethan Hawke shopping in SoHo with his daughter ... Jon Stewart caught in a traffic jam in the Flatiron district ... and John Mayer en route to the airport.
Did you read Sunday's Times piece about how people are getting their news from Jon Stewart these days? Because I sure as heck didn't! I don't need the Times to tell me to stop reading the Times and turn on my cable box — mainly because I was pretty sure I had read that same exact story in the Times before. But this morning, as the story was still carrying the top of the "Most Emailed List," I decided to go find that old Times story I remembered. Well, it wasn't easy. There are 102 stories listed in "Past coverage" of Jon Stewart (the original Michael Phelps!), about nine of which employ the phrase "get their news from." And yet I could not for the life of me find the one I remembered actually reading. Turns out it is because, like the former "young people" who started this whole "getting news from the Daily Show" trend, I am now very very very old…Because they've been doing this story since September 2000.
When one pictures the New York Times' fearsome literary critic Michiko Kakutani at work, the scene is of a book-lined, slightly dusty apartment, with Kakutani frowning over the book in her lap, perhaps with pencil in hand, getting ready to eviscerate a new novel that disgraces itself in various ways. A TV is most definitely not flickering in the background. But it seems that this image of Casa Kakutani will have to be revised, as she apparently just watched TV for the first time!
Jon Stewart's jovial yelling and trademark expressions (the Dr. Evil finger-to-mouth is particularly dated) are becoming increasingly tiresome. But Comedy Central's Daily Show does occasionally still perform a useful civic function. Last night, for instance, Stewart skewered Fox News and other cable networks for their delightedly reluctant airing of internet rumors about Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee. The Daily Show's writers came up with an amusingly silly definition of Baracknophobia: "The sickness manifests itself as rumor, most often in the form of the only email your grandmother has ever successfully been able to forward." But look out for an admirable dissection of Michelle Malkin's moronic claim that Obama plagiarized an old speech by Mario Cuomo. After the jump, last night's broadcast. Watch from about minute 5:00.
