"Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself."
-- V, V for Vendetta
I can only imagine how the conversation went back in 1997:
"Let's take a successful format ripped from SNL's Weekend Update that focuses upon celebrity gossip and books attractive twenty-something's to slavishly hawk whatever mind-numbing comedy or action movie is about to open at the box office, and replace it with a politically-oriented show that riffs off C-SPAN televised sessions, arcane congressional procedures (with the occasional gratuitous fart joke), and start to book politicians, authors, and professors who are plugging 300+ page books on topics that are mostly absent from our relatively younger demographic's everyday conversations. That'll make us one of the best shows on TV!"
And yet it happened. Now, with the passing of Walter Cronkite, the last vestige of an era where trust was placed in the hands of the person sitting inside the box, reading us the news without the demagoguery of Lou Dobbs or Glenn Beck, the "wink-wink" partisanship of everybody on Fox News besides Shepard Smith, or the garish CNN gimmicks where Anderson Cooper "beamed up" Will.I.Am,
voters in Time's online poll selected Jon Stewart of the Daily Show as the most trusted name in news now that Cronkite is gone.
Sure, an online poll is completely unscientific. And for most of you, the thought that a stand-up comic that became the host of a "poop-joke" show that came right after a show about puppets making crank phone calls has taken that mantle might elicit a gag reflex in some journalists out there.
But from his
takedown of Tucker Carlson on the now-cancelled Crossfire where he confronted the show's hosts that they were playing into the partisans' games, his now
infamous takedown of quivering Jim Cramer,
Bill Kristol's reluctant admission that government-run healthcare is good,
Ramesh Ponnuru, and the absolute class that he held by having
one of the most civilized debates on abortion I've ever seen with Mike Huckabee, it should be absolutely clear at this point that he is arguably the best interviewer out there. He disarms you with the expectation that you're there to facilitate humourous one-liners and quips, and then sneaks in a real, hard-hitting question.
Stewart has managed to put a show together that not only entertains, but imparts real information, and at that, important information you might not be getting on the "real" news networks. By forcing viewers to figure out what is real and what is satire (with the real sometimes much stranger than the satire), they are forced to think what their own opinions are on the matter.
There will always be a need for news straight-up, but Stewart has become the watchdog, making both networks and their viewers re-evaluate the form and function of news for fear/want that a segment show up on the Daily Show as what news
shouldn't look like. His role in keeping the media honest by creating a symbiotic relationship (at least to the viewers) between real news and fake news is exactly why he is so deserved of the title.
