No News is No News

Hollywood screenwriters hit the picket lines Monday. Screenwriters. They tell stories. They write fictions and jokes.

Which are the modern version of "news."

Michael Winship, president of the Writers Guild of America East, is glad that his union brothers now include the staffs of two programs that have a visceral connection with their young, obsessed audiences.

“These two shows are a big source of news for a whole generation that was not around for the 1988 strike,” he said. “Losing Stewart and Colbert is something like losing Cronkite during the Vietnam War. And because they are accessed in any number of ways both on television and on the Web, ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report’ are exactly what we are talking about at the bargaining table.”

Try not to understand what that means.