From the
NY Daily News Entertainment column (scroll down):
CBS News President Andrew Heyward said yesterday that he tried to be good-natured when the Television Critics Association decided to give Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" - a comedy series - the award for best news and information program Saturday night.
But the more he thought about it, he said, the more it bothered him.
Maybe he was embarrassed that the networks' highly paid spinners aren't succeeding in getting the talking points out?
The greatest wrong of all, he said, was not to acknowledge that "there are people around the world who literally now are risking their lives, risking death to bring back today's story from Iraq."
Aside from some embedded reporters during the initial military campaign, I wonder who he can be thinking of? Either it's the ones going along with terrorists on missions or the ones risking falling off their chairs in the hotel bar.
It would have been better, he said, to have declared no winner at all.
The award from critics points to a larger issue, said Heyward, about what is and what isn't news.
"We have to accept that there is a broad array of news, pseudo-news, ersatz news, meta-news, and one of our roles over time is going to be to sort through all those things and actually say, 'Okay, what are the facts?'"
He meant "Okay, what can we spin to further the liberal agenda?" If you're going to peddle fiction, don't be surprised when real fiction shows you up.
