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In a time when newspapers are flat-out dying if not dealing with bankruptcy or massive job losses, while other types of news orgs aren't faring much better, the journalistic success of a comedy show rant shouldn't be viewed as a stick in the eye -- but a teachable moment. Why be a curmudgeon about kids today getting all their news from a comedy show, when it's not really that hard to join Stewart in his own idol-smashing game?

Here's how:

1) Great research trumps good access to the powerful: The Stewart piece makes this controversial but critical point in two different ways. For one thing, the story shows how access to the nation's most powerful CEOs -- supposedly the big advantage of a journalistic enterprise like CNBC -- isn't worth a warm bucket of spit when it results in slo-pitch softball questions, for fear of offending the rich and powerful. And so we see Ford's CEO grilled about Kid Rock's performance at the auto show, Ponzi scammer (later revealed) Alan Stanford quizzed on whether it's fun to be a billionaire, and Maria "Money Honey" Bartiromo gushing at how corporate chiefs were still telling her that their companies were doing great, even as the massive iceberg was casting its shadow over the hull of the American economy.

Journalism as we know it is in crisis. Daily newspapers are going out of business at an unprecedented rate, and the survivors are slashing their budgets. Thousands of reporters and editors have lost their jobs. No print publication is immune, including the mighty New York Times. As analyst Allan Mutter noted, 2008 was the worst year in history for newspaper publishers, with shares dropping a stunning 83 percent on average. Newspapers lost $64.5 billion in market value in 12 months.

The authors [of a report pointing to how Washington DC charters performed so much better than public schools] say that charters and traditional schools “are, in general, educating students from similar backgrounds.” To establish this fact, they cite data about income and race—and about nothing else. But low-income students are not all alike, and the authors make little real attempt to address the long-standing, basic question about charters: Are the students who choose to attend these rigorous charter schools more ambitious, more determined, more focused than the students they leave behind?

Not all “low income” families are equally low-income. Are the low-income kids in the charter schools as low-income as the kids in the regular schools? We can think of a few simple ways to start to check, but the authors didn’t try to do so.

WASHINGTON POST HEADLINE (12/15/08):
Gains Made In Educating City’s Poor Children
Rigorous Methods, Ample Funds Linked to Improved Test Scores

We think that’s a fair account of what the authors said in their report. They suggested two reasons for the charter schools’ higher scores; the charters have a funding advantage, they said, and the charters apply rigorous methods not often seen in the regular schools. Five days later, the editors voiced their own views—and skipped right past that funding advantage. The eds made the news report’s tale even simpler: Charter school kids are outscoring their peers “because the charters are free to innovate and implement practices that work.”

Which is why they -- we -- hired an Academy Award-winning director, James Mangold, and a brilliant, Academy Award-nominated cinematographer, Wally Pfister.

(And then we put Kid Rock in it. As my friend Larry Doyle once said, "It's like buying a Ming vase and filling it with dog shit.")

Obama's innovative use of the Web during his campaign, for everything from encouraging supporters to vote to raising funds, marks a turning point in how politicians use the Internet and in how citizens can participate for social change, Gore said.

"What happened in the election opens up a whole new range of possibilities," he said. "Now's the time to really move swiftly to exploit these new possibilities."

Gore also talked about how his company Current TV, of which he is chairman and cofounder, is attempting to use the Internet to break television's decades-old monopolization of information, which he said has had negative consequences.

"A reason why the political system hasn't been operating very well until this election is the deadening influence of the TV medium as it has been operating," he said.

Asked by conference chair John Battelle if he is worried that this Web-powered social involvement among citizens will lose steam, Gore said: "No, I'm not. It's very much in its infancy, barely beginning. We aren't many years away from TV sinking into the digital world and becoming a part of it."

"The social activism that's made possible by these new tools is just beginning to take off," he added.

Gore, who has become a leading voice in recent years for the protection of the environment, said President-elect Obama should be bold in his goals to address climate change. For example, he should set a national goal for the U.S. to get all its electricity from renewable and non-carbon sources within 10 years.

"We can do it," he said, amidst heavy applause from the audience.

He cited various imminent dangers for the environment, including the 75 percent to 80 percent chance that in the next 5 years, the North Pole ice cap, which has been around for about 3 million years and is almost the size of the continental U.S., will disappear.

"This is an apocalyptic signal from the planet itself," Gore said.