Here’s a very funny but telling clip from The Daily Show last week about the web site Chatroulette. As Jon Stewart explains, the site allows you to randomly meet strangers via your webcam, but it has also led to loads of people getting their kit off. It’s like flashing without having to got out in the cold with only a rain coat on. But it’s the old media’s reaction to this website and it’s ‘dark side’ (as a journalist calls it) that Jon lampoons so will. Here’s what’s interesting about this clip:

• It saddening how most of the old media treats the new media like it’s both a threat and a passing fad. They seem kerfuffled by all the facebooks and twitters, which most regular internet users have taken to no problem, and it undermines the authoritative air that is the cornerstone of broadcast journalism. In the clip below you can hear the news anchors say things ‘look at this thing’ and ‘the latest craze’. Even the way Harry Smith pronounces the internet like ‘The Inter-Net’, as if it’s the crazy new toy that the kids are crying out for. I’ve seen many times before how the civil-service journalists of Ireland’s national broadcaster, R.T.E., seem so out of their depth on everyday lifestyle issues, it’s hard to watch.

• There’s the ‘almightier than thou’ attitude that the journalists adopt to the website’s ‘dark side’, yet they give it acres of coverage. It’s like the tabloid tactic when raunchy pictures are found of some TV presenter or upstanding citizen and they go ‘look at these disgusting pictures. You can see for yourself how disgusting these pictures are in our full colour, 2 page pullout featuring them’.

• But on the plus side, the clip shows the journalists that are willing to have a laugh with the personas that they and their colleagues put across, something that The Daily Show and it’s correspondents have done for some time.

• Plus there’s Jon Stewart at his funniest, I always get a laugh out of someone looking down a fish-eye lens!