With Stewart and Colbert refusing to answer questions, how they got the idea for the rallies is hard to know. But on Sept 1, just two days after Beck’s rally, a Reddit poster named mrsammercer wrote a late-night call for Colbert to hold a mock rally of his own, saying it would be “the high water mark of American satire.”

The internet petition soon had its own website and Facebook group, and was picked up by the Huffington Post. The “Restoring Truthiness” petition, which originally sought to get Colbert to hold a rally Oct. 10, ended up raising more than $200,000 for charity.

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Once Stewart and Colbert announced their plans last week, the mainstream media took over the role of the rally hype machine, in much the same way it did in the months leading up to Beck’s rally.

But while the New York Times and the Washington Post ran stories and columns skeptical of Beck’s motives, the papers so far have devoted prominent placement to uncritical articles of the Stewart and Colbert rally.

That has led some on the right to charge that Stewart is getting a “pass” from the media for doing exactly the same thing that Beck was so harshly criticized for – holding a big rally on the National Mall to represent his political point of view around the same time that Stewart also has a new book coming out. .

Beck had originally planned the rally to coincide with the release of a book called “The Plan,” but changed his mind about writing the book and shifted the emphasis of the rally to “Restoring Honor.”

Yet for his part, the conservative talk show host, echoing his magnanimous statements in a recent New York magazine profile of Stewart, said he wished the comedians the best.

"8/28 was a historic event for a lot of Americans,” Beck said in a statement Monday. “I hope that Ed Schultz, the AFL-CIO, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and whoever else wants to plan a march in D.C. have the same great success that we had with Restoring Honor."

If such positive media coverage continues, it seems entirely possible that the Comedy Central duo could outdraw their inspiration.

Either way, the comedians’ performance will be covered like a political event. C-SPAN has already applied to carry it live.