well. "Homer Badman" is a satire of shows like Hard Copy. David Mirkin, the show runner at the time, felt very strongly about the "tabloidization of the media" and has said that the episode is as current today as it was at the time and things have since gotten worse. Several gags in the episode are based on what real life shows like Hard Copy would do, such as making people look to be guilty without a trial as well as a complete invasion of privacy by setting up camp outside people's homes. The talk show "Ben" reflects the writers' feeling that anyone could host a talk show because all they need is a microphone and an audience. This leads to Homer using public access TV to try to clear his name. The character Birch Barlow, who hosts a conservative radio talk show in Springfield, is a take-off of American talk show host and political commentator Rush Limbaugh. Springfield has its own local newspaper, The Springfield Shopper. The newspaper is often isolated from mainstream media, so the characters do not seem to know of other ones. Dave Shutton is a reporter for The Springfield Shopper. He became less used since the episode "Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish" and has been reduced to cameo appearances and appearances in crowd scenes. Other newspapers are seldom mentioned on the show. In his book Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality, Jonathan Gray discusses a scene from "Homer Defined" that shows Homer reading a USA Today with the cover story: "America's Favorite Pencil – #2 is #1". Lisa sees this title and criticizes the newspaper as a "flimsy hodge-podge of high-brass factoids and Larry King", to which Homer responds that it is "the only paper in America that's not afraid to tell the truth: that everything is just fine." In the book, Gray says this scene is used by the show's producers to criticize "how often the news is wholly toothless, sacrificing journalism for sales, and leaving us not with important public information, but with America's Favorite Pencil". Internet Four months after the airing of a first episode "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", the newsgroup alt.tv.simpsons was created by Gary D. Duzan during the third week of March 1990. It was created before there was a World Wide Web, which emerged in 1993, so those earliest