Jon Stewart’s departure from “The Daily Show” is akin to the millennial generation losing its Walter Cronkite.
The news of Stewart’s pending departure broke Tuesday at almost the same time we learned NBC “Nightly News” would suspend anchor Brian Williams for six months without pay because of his helicopter snafu. As we processed these two big developments, the collective conscience unleashed itself on social media with thousands of manifestations of the same joke: The two should trade roles.
After all, Williams has displayed his comedic chops in a number of venues and could do well in a comedic setting. But more importantly, isn’t it Jon Stewart whom we ultimately trust to unpack the truth? Isn’t he the one who has, very plainly, called everybody — from those with whom he clearly agrees to those who consider him an adversary — on their bull? It is Stewart who has taken the news and infotainment media to task for dishonesty hundreds if not thousands of times. It is Stewart and his team of performers who have displayed enough self-awareness and a profound-enough grasp of reality to treat it as it often presents itself: tragic farce.
Millennials were raised in an America that largely looked the other way when it was sold a war predicated on hundreds of lies. Arguably, there was never actually anything to look away from because the media at large — and this is funny in a sardonic sense when the suggestion is made that our news media are inherently liberal — parroted these lies from the Bush administration without skepticism. The deaths, the debt, the loss of national stature, the infringement on civil liberties and the legacy of torture followed. Millennials, known as the first wave of digital natives for our access to and immediate comfort with the Internet, were able to see around the early blockade of discourse on this issue perpetuated by an entrenched media establishment. It’s at least partly because of this that millennials lean progressive. We saw this mess unfold before our parents did, and we felt crazy in a world where the news and popular media did not acknowledge this reality.
No one, that is, aside from Stewart and his merry pranksters.
Steeped in the tradition of satirical giants that include The Onion, the Stewart-led “Daily Show” — which picked up some of its staff from The Onion — fast became an authority by becoming the voice to which we looked for sanity.
The world hasn’t changed much — all those lies and all that media complacency and laziness still exist. And the one person who takes the fall is a guy who bragged about being in more action than he actually was — something Stewart hilariously and poignantly commented on in the same episode in which he announced his departure.
The “Daily Show” has been there for us all along, covering the news in the way we were taught the news is supposed to operate. Grimly, the only way the show was able to survive in a landscape that accepted that the news was inherently dishonest and lazy was to pretend to not be the news at all in order to cover it.
We came of age under the “Daily Show” approach, and it has impacted the way many agencies, journalists and organizations spread the word about what is really happening beyond the limited scope of the nightly newscast. I’m not worried about the future of that format, because the talent Stewart and company have brought to our attention is bountiful. I am hoping Jessica Williams takes his spot. In the meantime, I want to express my appreciation for Jon Stewart, the Cronkite of my generation.
He was the only one who didn’t need a leak to occur to consider asking serious questions, and he did it all the time. You need to ask the news to do its job these days, but you’ve never needed to demand it from Stewart.
Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was a teenager. He’s an owner-partner of a Portland-based content production company and lives with his family, dogs and garden in Cornish.
