Jon Stewart and the Daily Show are fantastically popular here in the US, and for good reason. It's the left wing's version of the Bill O'Reilly Show, a slanted take on the day's news, although Stewart uses comedy to make his point rather than browbeating.

The audience is largely made up of the young and middle aged, tending to be more affluent and educated than the majority of TV viewers, and as such is Apple's key target market. However, if Apple's PR team were watching last night, I suspect they were choking on their dinners.

In an eight minute segment called 'Appholes' Stewart ripped into the company for its conduct over the iPhone prototype case, the police raid on the editor of Gizmodo and Apple's contact with the person who found the prototype in a bar.

He contrasted Apple's history of appealing to the underdog and said that, while he liked the company's products and had been a faithful customer since the 1980s, the company had gone too far.

"You know I love you guys right?" he said in an impassioned monologue.

"Apple, you guys were the rebels, the underdogs, people believed in you. But now are you becoming the man? It wasn't supposed to be this way, Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one."
 
"But now, while you guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto, Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes, what the **** is going on?"

He joked that Apple should be taking up cause against AT&T for making the iPhone unusable as a phone due to its poor network performance.

Apple may also have a legal case on its hands as Gawker, publishers of Gizmodo, has apparently hired Thomas Nolan Jr., veteran criminal defence attorney, and Thomas Burke and First Amendment specialist Thomas Burke, according to Law.com.

Nolan said, "here's a serious question about the propriety of issuing a search warrant for a journalist."

30 Apr 2010