TV CRITIC DISAPPOINTED IN JON STEWART:

What was so revealing, however, about this portion of the show for me was not Obama’s predictable “we-inherited-all-the-trouble” rhetoric as he tried to defend his failures, but what a dogmatic leftist critique of Obama’s presidency Stewart clearly embraces.

Maybe I was deluding myself because I like the intelligence of Stewart’s humor, but I really believed he had a more balanced and centrist take on American life. If the White House was looking for the court jester and mouthpiece of the folks senior White House officials described as the “professional left,” they found him. He was sitting across from the president Wednesday night prodding him with all the White House had not done. . . . But he never once seemed to be able to even conceive of a question that would come at the president from right of center — or even center-center. Think how enriched this interview would have been by even one question from right of center asking about unintended consequences or huge federal spending programs that came nowhere doing what Obama had promised they would. . . .

I wish Stewart had not given the president 15 minutes of a free ride on the eve of such a hotly contested and potentially monumental election.

But that’s what you get in a culture with a broken down journalistic structure where citizens turn to comedians rather than the press for information and guidance in deciding their votes.

And worse yet, much of the press blindly turns to comedians like Stewart and Stephen Colbert for guidance, too.

Indeed.