The enemy, Jon Stewart told the masses gathered on the Mall in Washington Saturday for his “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” is not people of faith, or activists, or those who want to have passionate argument, or those on the right, or those on the left.

The enemy, he argued, is not Americans at all. It is instead the false image of Americans being pushed by the cable news-driven media – what he called “the country’s 24-hour politico pundit perpetual panic conflictinator – that he said is broken and making the country’s problems worse.

“If we amplify everything, we hear nothing,” Stewart said, accusing media outlets of fear mongering and spotlighting extremists instead of reasonable Americans. He later added that the press is America’s immune system – and “if it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker.”

Stewart’s comments came toward the end of the three-hour rally that attracted about 215,000 to the Mall according to an estimate commissioned by CBS News, with a message of standing up for reasonable dialogue.