Former Daily Show host and frequent headliner for this column Jon Stewart is a Media Winner again today for his appearance on The Late Show last night. His comments and back-and-forth with host Stephen Colbert on the Wuhan lab leak theory were a big hit, not to mention pretty on the nose.

The presentation was flawlessly entertaining, of course. “I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science,” said Stewart as they were discussing the advances in dealing with pandemics.

“Do you mean perhaps there’s a chance that this was created in a lab?” Colbert asked.

Stewart scoffed as he responded “A chance? There’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China, what do we do? Oh, you know, who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab! That’s just a little too weird!”

The rant and point/counterpoint went on from there in classic Stewart and Colbert style.

“How long have you worked for Senator Ron Johnson?” Colbert quipped at one point, prompting Stewart to respond, “This is not a conspiracy!"

That was the key comment, and it spawned a yuge trend on Twitter. And not a small amount of victory dancing.

Last year, it would have been impossible to do this bit. Even now there's a bit of 'Big Mad' from certain quarters. Naturally. But it was a terrific segment giving voice and accessibility to a debate that should be public and in good faith. Nice job.

Venerable paper of record and frequent headliner for this column the New York Times is a Media Loser once again today, after being finally forced to admit that the obviously satirical website the Babylon Bee is in fact a satire site. Not “misinformation” as it was previously described.

That description was labeled "imprecise" by the Times in a correction to a March 19 story, a move that followed threatened legal action by the Bee's operators.

“An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the Babylon Bee, a right-leaning satirical website, and a controversy regarding the handling of its content by Facebook and the fact-checking site Snopes,” the correction reads. “While both Facebook and Snopes previously have classified some Babylon Bee articles as misinformation, rather than satire, they have dropped those claims, and the Babylon Bee denies that it has trafficked in misinformation.”

This morning, top headlines at the Bee — which began in 2016 as a conservative alternative to The Onion — included “Surefire Ways to Win an Argument With Your Wife,” along with “Dems Shocked, Disappointed to Learn the New Israeli Prime Minister Will Still be a Jew.”

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon remarked on the change in a series of tweets on Monday night.

“The NY Times was using misinformation to smear us as being a source of it. That’s not merely ironic; it’s malicious," he wrote. "We pushed back hard and won."

Labeling it "misinformation" was itself misinformation. The grudging and late correction just highlights the losing moment.