“We work together to get things done every damn day! The only place we don’t is here,” he said, gesturing toward the Capitol, “or on cable TV.”

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It’s a compelling, sharply delivered critique that went down well on the Mall and on television, all amid a forest of hilarious signs and some pretty funny stuff that preceded it.

Gabriel Snyder, formerly of Newsweek and Gawker, said on Twitter, “the Rally to Restore Sanity turns out to be history’s largest act of press criticism.” My colleague Brian Stelter was in the press tent in Washington and described a hilarious scene in which some of the attendees, blocked by the crush from seeing the event, watched the monitors from the doorway of the press tent, laughing and applauding over the shoulders of the suddenly quiet people sitting there.

But here’s the problem: Most Americans don’t watch or pay attention to cable television. In even a good news night, about five million people take a seat on the cable wars, which is less than 2 percent of all Americans. People are scared of what they see in their pay envelopes and neighborhoods, not because of what Keith Olbermann said last night or how Bill O’Reilly came back at him.

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“If we amplify everything, we hear nothing,” Mr. Stewart said, and then went on to say, “not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate,” he said.

All due respect to Mr. Williams and Mr. Sanchez, not many people know or care who they are.

True, any poll of American attitudes toward the press would suggest a lot of people share Mr. Stewart’s distrust of media, and if they had a Rally to Restore Respect for the Media, it would draw two people. And one of them would be a hot dog vendor.

True also that the pushback by the news media here and elsewhere is predictable. On the day of the rally, James Poniewozik of Time magazine said, “don’t be surprised to see some defensive media responses to the critiques over the next few days.”

It’s not as if this is a new theme for Mr. Stewart, who first stepped out of comic character to build a withering assault on the “Crossfire” shouters back in 2004. On Saturday, he returned to media-induced pathology: “The media is like our immune system. If it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker — or perhaps eczema.”

But personally, I enjoy Mr. Stewart in his regular seat where he is less reasonable, less interested in obvious targets and less willing to suggest that all political ideas and movements are like kindergartners, worthy of understanding and respect if only the media would get out of the way. His barrage against the news media Saturday stemmed from the fact that, on this day, attacking the message would have been bad manners, so he stuck with the messengers.