The fact is that even hard news programs on all of television are entertainment. Occasionally useful entertainment, sure, but the notion that Walter Cronkite was doing something fundamentally different than Ed Sullivan or Jackie Gleason always struck me as both pompous and false.

But that being an equation, Stewart cannot simply ignore the role the Daily Show plays in “informing” its audience about current events by saying, oh, hey, I’m just a comedian doing a topical comedy show on Comedy Central. He knows what his demographics are and he knows that much of his audience do, in fact, use his show as their primary source of news. And as every Spider Man fan knowns (Spider Man fans being roughly the same demographic, I suspect, as Daily Show fans), from great power comes great responsibility.

People who watch Matthews for the most part know very well that they’re watching advocacy journalism and commentary and, when they stop to think about it, they know that the sort of advocacy journalism and commentary they have chosen to watch or listen to feeds their own political dispositions else they’d be listening to Air America or whatever. My guess, however, is that far fewer of those people rely on Matthews for their news than do Stewart.