While the show scrambled in its early years to book high-profile politicians, it has since become what Newsweek calls “the coolest pit stop on television,” with presidential candidates, former presidents, world leaders and administration officials signing on as guests. One of the program’s signature techniques — using video montages to show politicians contradicting themselves — has been widely imitated by “real” news shows, while Mr. Stewart’s interviews with serious authors like Thomas Ricks, George Packer, Seymour Hersh, Michael Beschloss and Reza Aslan have helped them and their books win a far wider audience than they otherwise might have had.
Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it’s been “The Daily Show” that has tenaciously tracked big, “super depressing” issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.
For that matter, the Comedy Central program — which is not above using silly sight gags and sophomoric sex jokes to get a laugh — has earned a devoted following that regards the broadcast as both the smartest, funniest show on television and a provocative and substantive source of news. “The Daily Show” resonates not only because it is wickedly funny but also because its keen sense of the absurd is perfectly attuned to an era in which cognitive dissonance has become a national epidemic. Indeed, Mr. Stewart’s frequent exclamation “Are you insane?!” seems a fitting refrain for a post-M*A*S*H, post-“Catch-22” reality, where the surreal and outrageous have become commonplace — an era kicked off by the wacko 2000 election standoff in Florida, rocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and haunted by the fallout of a costly war waged on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.
I have mentioned before that without Jon Stewart finding the funny in things that are truly frightening in the world around me I am not sure I would have been able to hang onto my sanity. That may be overstating things, but not by as much as you may think.
My two favorite, and most trusted, sources of news are the great Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart.
Every night before I drift off to sleep I watch the Daily Show, gently touching myself as Jon and his team of geniuses create magic out of the garbage that fell out of the cable news channels all day.
So is Jon Stewart the most trusted man on television? You betcha!
and blowhards like Matthews, Brooks and the usual suspects cannot believe they have lost their stranglehold on "news" disbursement.
ReplyDeletethey talk a lot, to each other since fewer and fewer people are listening -- and this drives them more and more insane