Jay Leno’s a pretty smart guy. His new show just wrapped up one of the most suc­cessful mar­keting cam­paigns for a tele­vi­sion show. My friend, who is in the know, informed me that an incred­ible per­centage of the nation’s pop­u­la­tion was aware that his show was moving to 10pm week­days. Now that he has our col­lec­tive atten­tion, I hope he does some­thing good with it. Because we need him and all like him.

It’s a sad era for Amer­ican tele­vi­sion. One of the best and pointed inter­views of John McCain I saw last year was on Let­terman. Most of the really good infor­ma­tion about pol­i­tics that I have received over the last few years has come from John Stewart and Bill Maher. When snake oil salesmen like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Ann Coul­tier are allowed to broad­cast lies, opin­ions, and hate as fact and infor­ma­tion, what are we to do but turn to the come­dians, the last sur­viving pla­toon of truth-tellers, to help us under­stand the world we live in. Because let’s face it: local news is a joke. You can get the same amount of infor­ma­tion and under­standing from a police blotter. CNN has been taken over by adver­tisers and broad­cast designers. FOX News is a mouth­piece of the extreme con­ser­v­a­tive right – they may as well hire Rush Lim­baugh as an anchor and quit the sub­terfuge of actual news.

That leaves us with late night comedy and Comedy Cen­tral. John Stewart has been qui­etly giving us real news under all the bluster of comedy for years now. His pro­tege, Steven Col­bert, has sur­passed his effec­tive­ness, skew­ering the right wing media by becoming a bril­liant parody of their irra­tionality. On HBO, Bill Maher reg­u­larly fea­tures guests that I’ve never heard of, talking about topics main­stream media won’t touch, telling me things that everyone really ought to hear. And in the best tra­di­tion of the court jesters that pre­ceded him cen­turies ago, he takes the truth of the world and spins it a little, making it funny enough to not be painful to swallow.

But Comedy Cen­tral is cable tele­vi­sion. HBO is pre­mium cable. Many people don’t have access to this kind of quality pro­gram­ming. Jay Leno is on net­work tele­vi­sion, at a time most people are still up, and now with a show that everyone knows about. He’s got an amazing oppor­tu­nity – he has the mega­phone in his hand.

So I toast to your suc­cess, Mr. Leno. I hope that your show has a long run. I only ask that you’ll give us some­thing back in return for watching, besides the laughs. Give us a little hon­esty, a little truth. Shed some light on the shadows of our igno­rance while we’re having a our fun. Those other jokers on the “news” have let us down.