The Legacy of Jon Stewart: Making 'Fake News' Real
As Jon Stewart wraps up his run on The Daily Show Thursday night, there’s a lot of mourning for a voice that will vanish from TV when he abandons his post. Critics and pundits lament that once Stewart yanks off his tie, there’ll be no one left to speak truth to power or Fox News, if that’s not being redundant.
Oh my: How far we’ve come, how low we’ve sunk, TV-news-wise. There’s now a national media consensus that Stewart — not any network correspondent, not a New York Times or Washington Post or name-your-favorite-online columnist — was and is the final mainstream representative of pointed news analysis. Without him, the common wisdom goes, all is lost.
An otherwise fine piece in Rolling Stone by Rob Sheffield carried the headline “Goodbye to the Last Honest Newsman” — a sentiment, to his credit, not in Sheffield’s piece. But its use is useful shorthand for just how cowardly and unimaginative much of the TV news media is at a time when there is more news coverage and supposedly bold opinionizing than at any other time in history. In essence, it’s no wonder Stewart is leaving: He tried to show the MSM how to do it, and it lacked the nerve and boldness to follow his lead.
Related: Will Comedy Central survive without Jon Stewart?
Once Stewart really got The Daily Show rolling, the establishment media was so desperate to appear hip and in on the joke that it played to Stewart’s advantage. Every outlet from the Today show to World News Tonight would play clips of Stewart saying things they might have wished to say (and in the process maybe attract some younger viewers) but couldn’t say themselves, lest they alienate their core (older, easier to offend) audiences.
In his glory days (circa 2004, when he figuratively set fire to Tucker Carlson’s bowtie and launched his death-dealing blow to CNN’s Crossfire), Stewart used to remind viewers — and people in the news media — that what he did was “fake news.” That is, a satirized take on actual events. As the series proceeded, however, Stewart — consciously or unconsciously, and I believe the former — came to present what he was doing as news, sometimes as breaking news and instant analysis that was serious enough to guide coverage of everything from wars to celebrity scandals.
Stewart moved surely, steadily, from a stand-up comic with a topical bent to a power-broker whose show became the place to go if you were a politician or serious author aiming to demonstrate you were in on the joke, that you could take some ribbing while increasing your poll numbers/sales figures. One result of this success is that Stewart started noticeably enjoying his new influence. Nowhere was this more clear than in his gradual but steady buddy-ship with Bill O’Reilly, whom he excoriated when O’Reilly wasn’t sitting opposite him, but whom he teased fondly when the Fox figure-head was within spitting distance.
Related: Bill O’Reilly: A Jon Stewart Appreciation
Indeed, Stewart’s rep became so burnished with glory that people rarely remarked on the fact that The Daily Show, once you got past Stewart’s fiery opening segments, was very uneven and sometimes not very good. His stable of correspondents, from Stephen Colbert to Samantha Bee, was frequently sharp and occasionally brilliant, but, especially over the last few years, the supporting players were often handed goofy, broad material to execute. And Stewart’s interview segments were almost invariably earnest but also frequently aimless affairs — he took to posting the entire interview segments online, less because they were filled with such bursting goodness, but were simply too all over the map to be edited for broadcast coherently.
Related: 5 Times Jon Stewart Broke on ‘The Daily Show’
For the past couple of years, Stewart could frequently seem exhausted by Congressional gridlock and the unending attempt to fend off the accusations that he was just a liberal shill by trying to find ways to criticize President Obama without actually going for the Commander in Chief’s throat. In his final months, his greatest source of pleasure — and most reliable source of real laughs — came from his impersonation of Donald Trump as a petty thug with a modified version of the New Joisey accent he usually reserved to impersonate mobsters and Chris Christie.
So leaving The Daily Show now, before the next Presidential election, makes sense for Stewart: His work is truly done, and godspeed and God help Trevor Noah. Unlike David Letterman, about whom it was necessary to feel ambivalent about his sticking around after the thrill was gone, Stewart’s short goodbye tour feels just about right. “Fake news” has truly blended with real news, and that’s become his most lasting legacy. In keeping with his best trait, he must feel ambivalent about that.
Jon Stewart’s final episode of The Daily Show airs Thursday, Aug. 6 at 11 p.m. on Comedy Central.
