Is it ironic?

Media Life has this article on the successes network evening news programs are having by covering the economic crisis.  My question: will they be able to capitalize on those ratings with advertisers? The irony is that TV’s biggest buyers (retailers and automakers, largely) have been some of the hardest hit by the very crisis giving the networks a bump. Unfortunate, yes. Maybe even ironic.

I wonder how the Web operations are going. They’re being dominated by the same type of coverage. Have pageviews/uniques jumped? How are the efforts to monetize that space going?