The Basic Cable Personality Clash Skirmish '09

RSS Feeds, Part II: I love my RSS Feed!

Is anyone else following the great Basic Cable Personality Clash Skirmish of '09 between Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and CNBC? It started last week, with Stewart's Wednesday night show where he layed into CNBC for bad financial advice in the days leading up to some very high profile economic failures (Bear Stearns). CNBC's Rick Santelli made a speech on the floor of the stock market protesting money going to help individual mortgage holders, and he cancelled on a planned appearance on Stewart's show. Stewart then layed into Santelli, Jim Cramer, and all of the CNBC gang, using his classic tactic of, mostly, just showing clips of their own words pitted against either (a) their own words at another time or (b) reality.

Well, only Jim Cramer decided to rebutt Stewart's attack, which caused another round to be fought in the Clash of '09. Monday night and last night, Stewart continued the assault. Cramer's making the rounds of all the NBC networks to tell his side of the story; Jon appeared with Dora and Boots, using his Viacom connections to fight his side of the battle.

What does any of this have to do with RSS Feeds? You're probably wondering by now. Well, one of my favorite websites is TV Squad, because I want, as soon as it goes up, to read their article on 30 Rock, and see what the reviewer and the commenters think are the best quotes from each week's show. If you know who I am, then you know I work on Thursday nights. I can't watch Survivor in real time, and Comcast doesn't put it up On Demand until the next day. Well, it's really, really, really, extremely important (and I do mean vital here!) not to see any Survivor spoilers before I've seen the show. Often it's well into the weekend before I watch the latest Survivor episode.

I don't want to be scrolling through the TV Squad articles on Friday and see anything about Survivor. And yet, I don't want to wait until the weekend to read my 30 Rock recap. What to do? I signed up for TV Squad's 30 Rock RSS Feed, and while I was at it I saw they had a general comedy one. I threw that one on my Google Reader as well. And so, thanks to RSS, I came across an article about Jon Stewart's CNBC "commentary" and made sure I watched his shows from last week. If (well, when, because who can stay up until midnight every night?) I don't see Stewart and Colbert in real time during the week, sometimes I catch up on my Daily Shows and Colbert Reports over the weekend online, and sometimes I don't. Thanks to my RSS Feed, I knew I wanted to watch this one. And now, I'm right there following the fight, step by step, and can see that Jim Cramer himself is going to be on The Daily Show tomorrow night. I know I want to watch that one in real time!

In addition, Monday night Jon Stewart himself commented on the fact that his skirmish had been picked up on in the "blogonet, intersphere, twitscape." The interplay between Stewart's show, bloggers, CNBC, Stewart again, and then more blogging (even me!) really shows the level of interaction and user content creation that is such a big part of Web 2.0.