Turns out New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller didn’t much enjoy the treatment he and his paper received at the hands of The Daily Show last month. As he said in response to a question from a Time magazine reader:
Well, that’s the last time I try to be a good sport. Even my wife told me that I looked faintly ridiculous, and she was trying to make me feel better. Among the people who would miss us most would be the wise-guy pundits and scriptwriters for satirical TV shows, because they riff on the news we produce.
Keller’s peevishness is understandable; one of the points of The Daily Show’s satire, after all, is to chide the press into doing a better job, and the Times, for all its faults, remains one of the best news organizations around. Still, it would be nice to see legacy institutions like the Times drop some of the condescension that tends to infect their view of the rabble-rousers in the digital and electronic media–some of which, after all, also do some real reporting of their own.
Greg Marx is an associate editor at CJR. Follow him on Twitter @gregamarx.