Check out this clip from Wednesday night’s episode of “The Daily Show” in which Jon Stewart analyzes (in his own way, of course) Obama’s Tuesday night Gulf Speech. Of particular interest, I think, is the fourth minute when he begins to look at the President’s use of religious language. Sure, Stewart interprets Obama’s assurance that there is a hand guiding us as “May God have mercy on our souls” and “freaky talk,” but keep watching.

It gets really interesting when he shows clips of Fox News in which Gretchen Carlson says that “some people” might think that calling out to God in this situation is “disingenuous coming from a president who doesn’t go to church on a regular basis.” To this, Stewart responds, “You must really hate this guy.”

If my friend and Curator Magazine editor, Alissa Wilkinson was late to the “Media Diet” party, then I am, without a doubt, a crasher. That being the case, however, I still want to take a bit of time here to record the specifics of my own media ingestion. I find, as I’m sure every other writer who has engaged in this exercise has, that it is a mildly self-serving endeavor. But even more that, I’ve found myself deeply interested, not only in the writers I follow or care about like Alissa or, at The Atlantic, Susan Orlean and a number of others, but in the reading habits of most anyone who cares to divulge.

The reason for this, I think, is that we are in a time of transition of how we consume media. Almost every writer who shares his or her media diet notes this, as I will too. So, without further ado, my media diet:

I’m a loyal person. I like to find one way to do a thing and then stick to it, to make it my routine. In that way, I’m also a creature of habit, so figuring out my routine is not only a necessity, it’s an obsession. And it’s a work in progress. Despite my hunch that there has to be a better way, I am betrothed to Google Reader. I’ve even tried the varied ways to make Google Reader friendlier such as using Feedly to “pretty up” my RSS feed. But, unfortunately, that fell flat. When Google introduced Fast Flip, I thought that may be the answer, but the fact that it doesn’t work on just any site I wish killed that option too. When Sessions posted a few months back that he was forsaking Reader for good old-fashioned bookmarks I tried to follow suit, but soon found that I missed having articles served to me. My latest compromise has been to use the “Next” bookmarklet in Reader. This allows me to choose some of my most necessary feeds and flip through them, viewing the actual web page instead of the ugly Reader interface and it also has the residual benefit of removing the constant pressure from the “unread” counter.

So each morning begins with a few (hundred) obsessive clicks around the Internet. Among my top reads are Engadget, NYTimes, The Daily Beast, HuffPost and Religious Dispatches. From there I check Twitter to see what interesting pieces might have slipped through the cracks and also to get my friends’ recommendations from around the web. Then, throughout the day I repeat this routine, sometimes choosing to click my “Next – Culture” or “Next – Books” bookmarklet to see only stories that I’ve categorized as such.

When it comes time to get out of apartment (where I work in the mornings) and onto the train, I toss a physical book into my bag (right now it’s McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity, expect some thoughts soon) and my iPhone in my pocket. It would be an understatement to say that my phone is my new portable media hub. I can access articles I saved using Instapaper’s “Read Later” bookmarklet offline, or check Twitter or Google Reader when I’m online. On top of that I’m also in the midst of a (so far) successful reading experiment in which I’m reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s A Thousand Splendid Suns in its entirety on the Kindle app on my iPhone. I was skeptical, but this has been a great way to decrease the weight of my bag and sneak in a few pages whenever I can. I will definitely keep this up.

On a related note, I have a list a mile long of books that I’m reading and/or want to read. And with my new gig as a book reviewer for The Star-Ledger, the hits keep coming. I’m currently whittling down 8 potential candidates to 5 reads for my first piece covering religion-related books.

When I had to drive to work I used to listen NPR every morning and I truly miss this. I’ve tried a few things such as streaming my local station while I work or listening to podcasts, but neither has caught on. I’m a reader and so if I have anything to read at hand (which, as you can see, I always do) I can’t just listen. Though I’m sure my eyes would thank me for the break if I did.

Additionally, my wife and I subscribe to a few print periodicals such as the New York Times Weekend edition, which we read throughout the week, as well as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Honestly, these don’t get read nearly as much as I wish they did, but who has the time? We also are members of Audible.com so we have a glut of unread (un-listened to) audio books. Again, I consumed these at a much faster rate when I was driving everyday.

I must also note that while all of this reading is happening there is a constant soundtrack, mostly from my own iTunes library which I’m obsessive about maintaing and which features selections from nearly every genre (although, I’m not big on classical). Sometimes, when I’m tired of my own collection and there’s nothing new on my radar, I flip over to Pandora to potentially discover something to add to my library.

Nighttime is when I catch up on television and movies. “Caprica” and “Parenthood” have joined the old Hulu standby’s “The Office,” SNL and “30 Rock” to comprise, with the occasional late night Daily Show/Colbert Report, my (online) television watching. And Netflix features (often documentaries) fill in the gaps when there’s nothing new on Hulu.

I’ve said on more than one occasion that if I could make media consumption my full-time and well paying job, I would. In the meantime, I’m fortunate to have a work situation that allows for a lot of media consumption in the cracks between and even, in some cases, pays me a little money to do it.

The only thing more miserable than journalism-job-hunting right now has to be journalism-job-hunting while social networking provides you an intimate look at what you’re missing. It seemed about as bad as it can get already, with nearly every media outlet shedding jobs and the traditional path to a magazine career so obliterated that even a great internship now promises you next to nothing.

But now, the mysterious, glamorous aura of journalism is pulled back, and, particularly if you haven’t work to occupy you, you can stalk other writers’ careers down to the minute: watch them do their reporting on Twitter, see the finished result when they post on their Facebook profile, and, more painfully, watch them all worry about the state of the media from their office chairs. You can convince yourself that they’re no more qualified than you—their writing no better, their connections no more illustrious, their thinking no more original—and wonder how you happened to be the one who drew the short straw.

I know this sounds incredibly self-pitying, and most of my friends who still have jobs in the media are neither ungrateful nor insensitive about their employment status. But there’s something doubly humiliating about being so close to the newsroom—to the point you’re a wall post away from a great editor him or herself—and still as much an outsider as ever.

You know that something is really the wave of the future when old-fashioned people actually start trying it, and then rejecting it as just plain too new-fangled. First Virginia Heffernan confesses that she hates her iPhone and its tarty, cutesy face. Then in The Columbus Dispatch, Joe Bundo says he violated his own baffling rule of technology adoption ("Always wait five years, to see whether it will go away on its own") to sign up for Twitter, which his 18-year-old daughter told him he would hate, and which he did in fact hate. 

In what sort of hell would you be subjected to the passing thoughts of not only Martha Stewart and Marc Dann but also car dealerships and a building under construction? That hell would be called Twitter.

I find it kind of amusing that he's just repeating everything everyone else has said about Twitter, except he's repeating it way after everyone else has moved on. It's possible that he hated it because he followed … Martha Stewart and car dealerships, and not interesting, informative people. It's also possible that he didn't see the use because he never … tweeted. 

The pride in unadaptability is baffling to me, and neanderthalism really is not as cute as Bundo seems to think. Technology never "goes away;" it gets replaced by new, better technology. Which we should then ignore for another five years until it's passe and then embrace, while disparaging whatever replaced it? This makes no sense. 

On his Twitter, NYU prof Jay Rosen wants to know why the McCain campaign did its best to piss off the media. He's referring to an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, in which Weekly Standard writer and McCain campaign blogger Matthew Goldfarb described his role with the campaign: 

I was a cudgel. I pissed off the media. They were furious about it. That was the effect the campaign was looking for.

Now that Goldfarb has said so in so many words, it seems obvious. The liberal media was a constant campaign theme, and now that Sarah Palin has pretty much started running for president in 2012, the theme goes on. 

Rosen demands (repeatedly) to know why anyone thought waging a culture war on the media was a good idea. Rosen doesn't understand because he's in the "oppressor" class.

Here are two recent news items that prove France is five million times classier than the U.S.A.:

• The French consume almost 60 litres (that's 15.9 gallons) of wine per person each year — more than any other country in the world. Not like those boorish Americans, who consume just a bit over 10 litres of wine each per year and 50 billion pints of classless beer collectively.
• The French government is bestowing the gift of a newspaper subscription on all French citizens when they turn 18. Sarkozy says it is the French government's responsibility "to make sure an independent, free and pluralistic press exists." (Which is why he's making it dependent on government help? Hmm.)

I'm wondering if this would actually work: Would people read print publications if they were literally dropped in their laps?