The Shape of Spin to Come

We are told that Jon Stewart appeared on Fox News Sunday. And then we are told this:

Host Chris Wallace pressed Stewart on why he didn’t consider The New York Times and The Washington Post biased for asking readers to help read Sarah Palin’s email trove.

“They never said ‘help us go through the 2,000 pages of the Obama health care bill,'” Wallace noted.

Perhaps because the Palin email trove was a mere 22,199 pages longer?

Or because the healthcare bill was an extremely slow-moving target, with plenty of time to analyze its twists and turns?

Or because crowdsourcing the Palin emails was nothing more than a clever audience-participation trick?

Or because What the fuck?

We’ve been watching the Ken Burns jazz documentary all weekend. We’ve just reached the moment where Ornette Coleman blows the walls out, dropping all pretense of form for a fundamentally freewheeling music that makes its own rules and finds its own structure as it goes.

When it works, it’s heaven. And when it fails, it’s noise. There is no in-between.

Chris Wallace, near as we can tell, is trying to be the Ornette Coleman of spin.

Only Chris Wallace is no Ornette Coleman.