At his Oct. 30 "Rally to Restore Fear and/or Sanity" where he spoke before approximately 200,000 supporters, Stewart focused on the press, or as he described it, “the country’s 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator.” The rally took aim at the news media's focus on sensationalist scoops and divisive politics, but New York Times media columnist David Carr felt that the event avoided more relevant issues.

"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," Carr wrote.

Though he took issue with the rally's focus on media, Carr's assessment of the event was, by no means, overwhelmingly negative. He referred to Stewart's remarks as "a compelling, sharply delivered critique that went down well on the Mall and on television."

In spite of the respectful tone of his column, Carr received hundreds of e-mail responses critical of his piece. "I'm probably up over 400 responses now, and they're still coming in at the rate of like one every half-an-hour and at the start, they were unbelievably ferocious," Carr said in a phone conversation with The Observer.  Along with the more virulent messages, Carr said he also got "hundreds and hundreds of them that are super reasonable."

"I would say it was an outsized response, it may be due to the imprecision of the column, but it's mostly due to the fact that I chose a topic that many people consider sacrosanct … To many people, Jon Stewart is a kind of Baby Jesus. He's an important corrective on the media and political industrial complex, but that doesn't mean he's right all the time," Carr told The Observer.

Carr's brush with the Stewart faithful comes just shy of a month after CNN anchor Rick Sanchez was fired after a controversial radio appearance  where he suggested that Jews control CNN and called Stewart "a bigot." Sanchez implied that Stewart is close-minded and doesn't allow a diverse selection of guests on his show.

"Yeah, I think he's a bigot … I think he looks at the world through his mom who was a schoolteacher and his dad who was a physicist, or something like that," Sanchez said in the interview.

The incident immediately caused a media firestorm. Though his comments were clearly inappropriate, CNN gave Sanchez the axe with astonishing speed. He was fired by the network less than 24 hours after the interview began making headlines in the blogosphere. Sanchez' contract with CNN had recently been renewed.

Irin Carmon, a writer at Jezebel.com, didn't lose her job after pointing out the lack of diversity on The Daily Show, but she still faced intense backlash when she wrote a post that called Stewart's show "a boys' club where women's contributions are often ignored and dismissed." Carmon's story included multiple interviews with former The Daily Show contributors.

Carmon's piece earned a rebuke from Slate and an angry letter from the female staffers of The Daily Show. She also got a wave of angry e-mails and comments from readers. 

"Particularly once The Daily Show issued its open letter a while after the piece ran, I got a seemingly unending stream of aggressive, hostile e-mails from readers who seemed unfamiliar with the site. A typical one had the subject line, 'How does it feel to be put in your place?' if I recall correctly," Carmon said in an e-mail to The Observer. 

Carmon said she felt the feedback she received from Stewart fans seemed out of place with the Daily Show anchor's public persona. "It's interesting to me that a media figure whose message is theoretically about critical thinking and, more recently, civility, can inspire such knee-jerk defensiveness," Carmon told The Observer.

According to Carr, the protectiveness of Stewart's fan base isn't unprecedented. "Any time you get on a cult figure, if you were to write about in vaguely negative terms about Martin Scorsese, or Jeff Tweedy, or Mad Men, or Matt Weiner you'd engage the cult … if I write about Palin or Glenn Beck it happens too," Carr said.  Carr's comparison of Stewart and Beck is apt. It's also dangerous for the The Daily Show host. Stewart's rally originated as a spoof of Beck's Aug. 28 "Restoring Honor" event. With the Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear Stewart has shown that he has political power and legions of followers. The question is whether Stewart can retain his position as an anti-establishment media critic as he increasingly becomes surrounded by a cult of personality.

Mr. Sanchez issued a public apology earlier today. "Despite what my tired and mangled words may have implied, they were never intended to suggest any sort of narrow-mindedness and should never have been made," he wrote.

Mr. Sanchez also said that he was leaving on excellent terms with CNN. "I have tremendous respect for everyone there, and I know that they feel the same about me," he wrote. "There are no hard feelings – just excitement about a new future of opportunities." It's an interesting way to frame getting fired from the network.

Mr. Sanchez's wife Suzanne echoed the explanation that Mr. Sanchez was tired on her Facebook page earlier this week.

rick feels horrible that in an effort to make a broader point about the media, his exhaustion from working 14 hr days for 2 mo. straight, caused him to mangle his thought process inartfully.

Mrs. Sanchez also posted on her wall on September 20th that she and Mr. Sanchez recently closed on a lakefront home. "[L]ooking forward to having easy access to our boat and taking it out on weekends," she wrote. And maybe during the week now too!

Earlier: Video: Jon Stewart's Rick Sanchez Post-Mortem

Ann Curry was on fire.

"Here's what's pissing me off," she said, leaning forward in her chair. She was jabbing a pale finger at the audience of more than 350 new media types who had unfolded their laptops at the 140 Characters Conference on June 16th.

"The reason I have to fight every time to do these stories is because the truth is that it's hard to get the majority of Americans or even a significant number of Americans in NBC, Fox, ABC, CBS's world, to care," she told the crowd, who had, probably for the first time during the all-day conference lifted their heads from their laptops to listen. "I think journalism is a battle and I feel the scars and I see the blood on my sword on a daily basis for fights for foreign coverage to be more present in our broadcasting."

Ms. Curry, the Today Show news anchor and Dateline host, wearing a modest blue dress and purple sweater, was on stage at New World Stages on West 50th Street with her Today Show producer Ryan Osborn, CNN Newsroom anchor Rick Sanchez, and Clayton Morris, co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend. They were speaking about the "disruptive nature" of Twitter to traditional news gathering, just two days after major news networks came under fire in the Twitterverse for their perceived lack of coverage of the violent protests in Iran. A real-time battle about what it means to be traditional media in a "now media" world unfolded.

Mr. Sanchez, who responded on the #CNNfail trending topic on Twitter on his Monday show, started off the conversation, prickled by questions about his network's coverage from moderator Robert Scoble, a tech super-blogger and Twitter and FriendFeed evangelist who recently left FastCompany.tv for his own pursuits.

"We did cover it, every hour on Saturday," Mr. Sanchez insisted. "There were times on Saturday that we were being criticized for not looping or not showing that protest video," he continued. "Those are decisions that are made by executive producers in the heat of the moment and throughout the day's news. But at no time did we drop the ball on covering the story itself."

He also added that the network was in "constant contact" with their chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, "who was there on the ground, in Tehran, with tear gas in her eyes and in her face, actually covering the story, and that means a lot. And I think it could be a little insulting to someone like her to say that we weren't on the story just because...we weren't rolling coverage of the protest of every moment of the day on Saturday, the second Saturday of the summer."

Mr. Scoble asked if traditional news judgment, which tends to skirt foreign coverage, is changing because so many Twitter users feel connected with others using the platform across the globe.

"This is the first time that we are going to be able to connect with citizens that we, in the so-called mainstream media, will be able to pay attention to...who out there could be a reliable source aside from our talking heads….and happy faced, really pretty anchors,” said Mr. Sanchez.

"I'm not sure I'm a happy faced, pretty anchor," interrupted Ms. Curry.

"Is the mainstream media covering the world enough? And the answer is no," she added. "The world is changing and we're not keeping pace."

Ms. Curry had just returned from Iran to tape an hour-long special titled "Inside Iran" for Dateline NBC, which aired Sunday night. Ms. Curry blogged her coverage for Dateline’s site, took pictures during her tour and, of course, Twittered.

"There is a set of rules,” she said about her “real-time” reporting. “I feel a great obligation never to Twitter something that is wrong."

"Reporting is a service job, it's not a business," she said. "It's about taking care of people and you take care of people by looking at the truth and you work for people who are reading or watching or listening to you."

Mr. Osborn, the Today Show producer, came to her defense: "We refuse to kind of sacrifice our creditability that was built on generations and generations of producers and reporters before us. In a way, we're asking for patience."

But while Ms. Curry is doing her best to adapt to the “now” forms of news-dissemination, Mr. Sanchez seemed to have a few hangups about the wave of demands from Twitterers.

"You," Mr. Sanchez said, addressing the crowd, "and the social media on Twitter have been pushing us at CNN to drive the story about whether this Iran election was legitimate or not. And I have read on Twitter countless reports that it wasn't. I have checked with our sources on the ground there and not a single one of them have been able to confirm that there is an impropriety."

"Let me come clean with you guys, and let's not pretend that we're talking to children," Mr. Sanchez said. "If today, Britney Spears is caught shoplifting topless, I'm making this up by the way, and we don't do it…”

Ms. Curry interjected, her lips pursed at her microphone: "I'm not doing the interview and I'm not doing it."

Mr. Sanchez talked over her. "But I guarantee you, normally, they will have a million viewers to our 20,000 if we decide we're going for Darfur."

"Some things you've gotta do," Ms. Curry said. 

"I use Twitter to make sure that anything I can't get on TV I get out there," she added.

She said while she was reporting in Iran, many citizens and protestors feared her coverage would "demonize" them as terrorists.

"Often times, when we go into foreign countries, one of the worst mistakes that we make as mainstream media people, as any kind of media people, and I hope this changes with the advent of citizen journalism, is that we are unable to empathize in a way that sees their story truthfully," she said. "We often go in as Americans telling the story of how Americans see the story going on somewhere. That is a huge mistake."

And she implored the crowd to use their tech savvy to "compassionately" cover the under-covered world.

"I want you, whether you're in the Congo or Darfur or if you're in Iran or if you're in Tanzania, Kosovo, places we've gone to, you shoot that story like it's your mother, your brother, your sister, your father and your cousin and you tell that in that way because that's actually the road, I think, to not only clarity and truth and understanding. But I think it's also the road to really fully becoming global."

“I need a hard-throwing righty out of the bullpen,” to fill in for Paula Zahn as anchor for a week in the crucial 8 p.m. weekday time slot, Mr. Klein wrote, according to Mr. Sanchez. “Can you be in New York by Monday?”

It's less than a thousand miles from Atlanta to New York, but the distance between his gig as a weekend daytime anchor for CNN, and the new show must have felt much greater*. This was the big leagues: If only for a week, the energetic, 49-year-old Cuban immigrant would go head-to-head against Fox’s fed-up conservative, Bill O’Reilly, and MSNBC’s liberal sophisticate, Keith Olbermann.

He threw a few suits in a bag, jumped on a plane and covered for Ms. Zahn for a week. Things went well. So well, in fact, that the following week, after CNN announced Ms. Zahn was leaving the network, Mr. Klein asked: “Can you do another week?”

That week, too, went well.

“So then he says, ‘Can you do a month?’” Mr. Sanchez remembered, in an interview at his new office in the Time Warner Center. Next, he remembered, it was, “Can you go through Labor Day?” Then: “Can you go through November?” And now, said Mr. Sanchez, “We’re going through February,” when the network’s new star hire, Campbell Brown, will step into the slot.

And so, in the strangely ad hoc way that most things in this business seem to happen, he’s getting the biggest audition of his career.

His past couple of months as the host of Out in the Open, the opinionated 8 p.m. news-and-debate program he leads until Ms. Brown arrives, has gotten him lots of attention. Some cable-news insiders think Mr. Sanchez has his eye on the 7 p.m. time slot*. At present, CNN’s prime-time lineup is a little screwy: Mr. Blitzer is on the air from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., then comes Lou Dobbs’ Lou Dobbs Tonight from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Then Mr. Blitzer—again—from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. How much better to start a new franchise in that hour!

Mr. Sanchez won’t be drawn out on his ambitions at CNN.

“For me it’s just a wonderful opportunity to be able to showcase what we can do,” he said, carefully. “And to show that there is a huge audience out there that probably needs to be spoken to as well.”

CNN knows that well enough. During Ms. Zahn’s tenure, the network had fallen into a distant third place among cable news networks in the 8 p.m. time slot, behind Fox and MSNBC.

Mr. Sanchez’s six month tryout pins the young buck with a straight-shooting style and a reputation for daredevil reporting up against the O’Reilly’s and Olbermann’s of the world. And it’s an opportunity to test out a new voice for the network that just might have something going for it.

Mr. Sanchez’s parents fled Cuba for South Florida when he was 2, and it was in Miami that he got his start, hosting a Spanish-language radio show while making his name as an English-language anchor for the city’s Fox affiliate, WSVN.

Lately he’s been aggressive about staking out his territory with the other guys. Out in the Open has developed its own cause—the struggles of Hispanic immigrants—that fits well with his own story, and pushes a political hot button.

“We really want to fight for the little guy,” Mr. Sanchez said, an uncharacteristically somber look flashing, for the moment, over his boyish, unlined face. “And, in this case, I think, the littlest of guys in this country right now is the Mexican immigrant.”

Of course, the direction makes strategic sense for CNN, especially as it continues to figure out how to counter conservative icon Mr. O’Reilly. As Mr. Sanchez himself puts it: “For a long time, cable news has said either, ‘We’ll just stay right here in the middle and not say a whole lot,’ or, ‘we’ll go way over to the right and say a lot.’ But there’s a whole other audience out there … America really is a melting pot.”

“I know it sounds a little hackneyed,” he said, “but defending the little guy is hard these days, and it’s not something that anybody wants to do, and I do it because—not just because I’m a minority—but because I frankly feel what it’s like to be these people who are really downtrodden right now, you know, to be a Mexican immigrant. Because I know what it’s like to be poor.”

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Bill!

And Mr. Sanchez has no fear of confronting his rivals directly.

On his Sept. 19 show, Mr. O’Reilly told viewers: “I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks.” Later, during a discussion with a correspondent, he added, “There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-F’er, I want more iced tea.”

Mr. Sanchez saw his opportunity. He called Mr. O’Reilly and asked for an explanation, then dedicated a segment of his show to a debate over the Fox News–man’s words. Mr. O’Reilly fired back, and the blogs buzzed the next day with talk of the skirmish.

CNN has found that the sweet-faced Mr. Sanchez does well in a controversy, and despite Mr. Klein’s much noted 2005 decision to cancel Crossfire, after Jon Stewart famously accused the long-running political shoutfest of “hurting America,” studio debates on race and homosexuality have become a key part of the programming for Out in the Open.

That Mr. Sanchez will do a lot to get a big story was well-known already. At various times in his career at CNN, he has submerged himself in a car that was sinking underwater to show viewers how best to escape; been intentionally left at the top of a snow-covered mountain to convey the difficulties of surviving the elements; and been tasered at a Florida police academy.

The move towards more attitude—from an ideological perspective or not—makes a certain sense. As Ms. Zahn found out, no one wants straight news in that time slot any more.

“By 8 p.m., everyone kind of knows what’s going on,” Mr. Sanchez told The Observer.

It must be a sign of something that Mr. Sanchez’s tormentors are significantly higher on the media totem pole than the ones who tormented him back in Miami.

In the 1990’s, he won the title of “Least Credible News Personality” from Miami New Times, the city’s alternative weekly, so many times in succession that the paper named the award after him.

Mr. Sanchez had already survived what would ordinarily be a career-killer*. While leaving a Miami Dolphins game with his father in 1990, Mr. Sanchez struck a drunken pedestrian, who later died of his injuries. According to police, Mr. Sanchez’s own blood-alcohol level was above the legal limit, and he left the scene before returning. He ultimately pleaded no contest to a D.U.I. charge, but avoided jail time, and even remained on the air.

Asked about the incident, Mr. Sanchez’s Ron Burgundy jocularity vanished in an instant. “I don’t see where that has anything to do with anything,” he said, and called the inquiry “a hatchet question.”

He soon regained his cool though. “Was it an unfortunate experience? Yes. Was it a learning experience? Absolutely. Do I wish it hadn’t happened? Of course,” he allowed. “I was wrong, because I had a couple of cocktails, because I was over the legal limit,” he went on. “It could have happened to anybody. … There were probably a lot of other people leaving the stadium that had had a couple of beers as well.”

Somehow, Mr. Sanchez weathered all of that long enough to attract the attention of cable-news upstart MSNBC. In 2001, the network pulled Mr. Sanchez out of Miami and gave him his own daytime news and talk show. But the critical reception was underwhelming—an industry newsletter called him “a tabloid-bred brickhead,”—and the ratings were abysmal.

By 2003, Mr. Sanchez was back in Miami hosting another daytime show for NBC affiliate WTVJ. Had he scotched his big break? No, in fact, for the following year, CNN came calling, recruiting him to fill a daytime host slot alongside Daryn Kagan.

And there, he has flourished enough to get roasted in the greatest roasting pit of American media. On the Daily Show earlier this year, Mr. Stewart seemed to take special pleasure in mocking his taser segment.

“Jon Stewart can make all the fun he wants of me, but that was an important story,” Mr. Sanchez said earnestly.

You’re almost there, Rick!

“We feel the buzz, we hear the buzz, we’re getting the e-mail,” he said, getting himself excited. “We’re laughing all the time when we get together in editorial meetings. It’s really a great feeling—and it would be wonderful if somehow we could make it last.”

*This sentence has been changed from an earlier version.