According to a recent Time Magazine poll, Jon Stewart is now “America’s most trusted newscaster.” To account for this phenomenon, I would choose two ways to basically state the same point: 1) Not to take anything away from the brilliant Jon Stewart, but it probably says more about the pitiful state of the cable news media than it does about Stewart himself. 2) It is the result of Stewart and the Daily Show often managing to offer more substantive journalism than cable news actually does, ironically as Stewart and co. are primarily mocking cable news.

It’s really a brilliant thing, and I personally think Stewart is doing great and hilarious work. And I think a fine example of why Stewart has gained such trust is his recent interview/debate with long time health care reform opponent/career misinformant, Betsy McCaughey (pronounced mac-coy). (Unfortunately, the full episode cannot be embedded it seems. But it can be viewed in full here. Go to the the second section – the 8:00 minute mark – on the episode to see the interview from the beginning. Two clips of the extended interview are also available at thedailyshow.com).

The interview is really worth watching closely, because it stood out to me as almost a microcosm of the mainstream media discussion of health care reform overall. While watching, think of McCaughey as somewhat representative of the loud opponents of reform in the conservative media, and think of Stewart as representative of progressives that desire reform and are sympathetic to the current effort.

Notice Stewart, during the interview, is saying things like, “No, that’s not what the bill says, and you can’t make it mean that. Can we please just have a rational discussion about this?” Then consider McCaughey, on the other hand. She claims the house bill is “dangerous” and “cruel.” She even shows up with half of it in a binder, I guess as an attempt to give herself some legitimacy. Yet, if you watch closely, you’ll notice that she never actually reads from the bill, despite Stewart repeatedly requesting this. In fact, even though only a few pages are the main point of discussion here, she did not have those sections bookmarked (as Stewart jokingly points out) and was clearly not prepared to read them.

Watch her hands and eyes throughout. It is agonizing to watch her stumble through the bill, point out key pages over and over only to not read from them, and then totally lose her place a couple times after all that hunting anyway. It finally gets to the point where Stewart says, “Well, get it!” referring to the oft-loosely mentioned pg. 432. Then he eventually takes the binder to read that part of the bill after a commercial break.

What McCaughey chooses to do throughout instead is simply claim what parts of the bill say and what she thinks it all means or will mean. In other words, rather than, ya know, actually read the bill to us, she would rather play the part of the authority and holy keeper of the bill. So she simply says she’s read it all, and seemingly expects us to accept on faith her interpretations and predictions regardless of the actual language of the bill.

This is an example of why the so-called health care debate has become so confusing and toxic. What McCaughey does here is actually the common trend among reform opponents in the conservative media. The main problem is not that these folks are just simply lying and making stuff up. No, it’s even more insidious than that. What they are doing (thanks largely to McCaughey) is latching on to certain provisions in house bill 3200 and manipulating the intent or interpreting the language to mean what they want these provisions to mean.

What I think is happening here is folks like McCaughey, Limbaugh, et al, are willfully exploiting the high level of political and legislative illiteracy we have in this country. It seems that McCaughey and her ilk are operating on the assumptions that a) the majority of people will not have read any of the bill, and b) even if they have read or will read any of the bill, the language will seem vague enough to make scary interpretations seem plausible, particularly lacking outside context. So then, McCaughey and others are more than happy to reference certain sections and exact page numbers of a bill all day long (without actually reading from them most of the time), and then make assertions about what they say or provide for. Yet, if they are discredited based on what the bill actually says, they then ignore the actual language and resort instead to baseless proclamations about what the language “actually means” or will “logically” lead us to.

It’s difficult to calculate just how poisonous these tactics are. But, I fear the end result is all too often this: once the interpretative spin is put on the bill provisions, by the time the bill is actually read by those who are partial to this spin, the bill is then useless. At that point, it doesn’t matter anymore what the bill actually says, because the language has already been interpreted to say something it doesn’t actually say, or mean something it doesn’t necessarily mean, or baseless speculations have been made about future consequences.

As a result of all this, the fear and hype then quickly goes far beyond a rational discussion of the actual bill itself, and all trust in and the purpose of the language given has been successfully destroyed. This leaves us with a situation (actually this is just part of a bigger problem we have) where people essentially can and do believe whatever it is they want to believe based on their own personal selection of “trusted” sources and selective interpretations.

But Stewart granting McCaughey all this airtime raises a key question of the moment: how are people like McCaughey best approached, if at all? Perhaps it is worth it in the end to have McCaughey on The Daily Show to lay bare her unfounded claims, but would we often be better off by ignoring and talking past the McCaugheys out there, rather than giving them the attention they crave? Or must they first be discredited like this before more rational discussion can begin? Is that effective? But then, is getting everyone distracted away from more important aspects of reform with the need to spend valuable time discrediting misinformation in this way a major strategic point of such misinformation in the first place? It’s quite a dilemma.

But more importantly, I hear you ask, what cable news source can we possibly trust in for the next 3 weeks while The Daily Show takes vacation? May I recommend the Rachel Maddow show on msnbc. I just recently discovered it via the Interweb, and it’s been quite top notch of late.