Rachel Maddow appeared on Tuesday's "Daily Show" to talk about Osama Bin Laden and the news business with Jon Stewart.
She called the Bin Laden story "one of those time when if you have a big ego about being in the news business, it's going to be worse," since there was so much attention being focused on Bin Laden's death.
"This is one of those stories that is impossible to mess up unless you try to get out ahead of it," she told Stewart. "...Even if you're not one of those people who's out there singing in the streets about this, we are all having an emotionally cathartic reaction to it."
Stewart said he thought that sort of humble, cautious reaction to the story had lasted "about 47 minutes," before it "devolved back into the regular sort of categories that the news has to place things in as they go along."
Maddow said she agreed. "This is one of those times when you either prove yourself as a jerk or you prove yourself as not," she said. "There's plenty of time to score political points on this! Osama Bin Laden is going to be dead forever."
She also said that she "had an understanding of what the president was going to announce" when he came on the air.