Jon Stewart’s fans were gobsmacked by the sad news he delivered on Tuesday’s edition of The Daily Show: He is leaving his phony anchor desk and ending his reign as phony newsman, and the loss is to real news.
“This show doesn’t deserve an even slightly restless host and neither do you,” he told his audience.
He said he might depart in July, September or maybe December. He did not say what he means to do next.
Photo: AFP
To appreciate the impact of his 16-year Comedy Central reign and the loss his impending exit represents, the distraught viewer need only consider Monday’s broadcast.
It was then that Stewart turned his attention to what was the biggest story in the journalism biosphere that night: the scandal surrounding NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams.
Wearing a woeful expression, he summed up everyone’s befuddlement with crystalline efficiency: “Bri! Why? Why, Bri? Why lie? Sigh.”
By then hours upon hours of pontificating, grousing and hollow forecasts from other corners of the media had been focused on Williams, nailed a few days earlier for apparently fudging an account of his experience a decade ago covering the war in Iraq: He seemed to have misremembered that he was not, as he had declared repeatedly, shot out of the sky in a military helicopter.
Choppergate seemed custom-made for the cable-news universe. The endless talk supported by few known facts and snap-judgment calls for his dismissal.
By contrast, in the tidy eight minutes or so that followed Stewart’s silly rhyme, he proposed a shrewd diagnosis for what might have led Williams to muddle his serious news cred with habitual visits to any talk show (including, of course, The Daily Show) that would have him, where he could show off his charm as a wit and raconteur.
Stewart called it Infotainment Confusion Syndrome, a brain misfire that occurs, he said, “when the ‘celebrity cortex’ gets its wires crossed with the ‘medulla anchor-gata.’”
Stewart had one more point to make. He mocked the mediaverse for obsessing over Williams’ alleged misdeeds: “Finally SOMEONE is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq war.”
“Never again,” he added dramatically, “will Brian Williams mislead this great nation about being shot at in a war we probably wouldn’t have ended up in, if the media had applied this level of scrutiny to the actual [bleep] war.”
It was a splendidly crafted satiric fusillade, the sort of cheeky truth-telling no one but a self-styled fake news anchor would dare. And until Williams was suspended by NBC for six months roughly 24 hours later, Stewart had said everything that needed to be said.
Stewart did not invent satire, but he modernized it and tailored it for an information age ruled by TV and the Internet. In compact The Daily Show segments, he struck a blow against the flabby boundlessness of cable-news and talk-network fare.
The timing of Stewart’s departure could hardly be worse from the viewer’s perspective, with the campaign for next year’s US presidential election gearing up. In recent cycles, Stewart had made himself as much a part of the electoral process as ballot-counting disputes.
For that and many other reasons, it is hard to fathom the scope of the void he will leave. As a champion of enlightened phoniness in TV journalism, Stewart has proven himself to be one-of-a-kind, a fake who is unrivalled as the real deal.
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