Stewart's Clue, named after Daily Show host Jon Stewart, holds that you can get away with truth if you say you're just trying to be funny.

The Clue is as old as comedy. Comedians have always been the ultimate truth-tellers.

And Stewart is indeed a truth-teller. His show is a biting satire of the media. Politicians think it's about them, but they're just the means to an end. And the end is that the media has been corrupted by money and power, that it has lost its soul and lost its way.

Now seldom does the "serious press" take this Clue seriously, mainly because the serious press is so...serious.

But someone finally caught on.

That someone is Keith Olbermann (right). Nice guy. Used to be on ESPN. Moved to MSNBC once. Quit when forced to do Monica-gate non-stop. Came back somehow. They gave him an hour because they were desperate, going down for the third time. In sports terms he's an aging outfielder given one more chance to make good, a Roy Hobbs with a TelePrompter. (With Bill Gates as Pop Fisher.)

He's using it. His new show, Countdown, is quite good. And it's all on him. When he misses a show the show is, at best, ordinary. But when he's there it's magic.

Now, about the Clue. Olbermann has taken on the Bill O'Reilly Scandal in a way even Stewart has been unwilling to do. And he's playing it as Stewart would, for laughs. (The image is from Olbermann's "blog," actually an occassional column that is him at his best.)

This has allowed him to "take the bark off" on top news stories, to say things other anchors are unwilling to say because, well, they're serious. Olbermann makes himself foolish and uses that to do something quite serious and quite important.

Brilliant.