I hate when he rants against news media like he did at the end. It’s easy to point at them and say “They’re doing it wrong”, but he won’t start his own news media company where he lives by what he preaches. Instead he’ll just do a 30 minute show (once a week).
I would rather him just tackle the issues and drop the meta analysis.
He did more to improve the discourse of journalism, over the course of the 2000s, than pretty much any other single person in broadcasting. He went on bad shows and argued with them to their faces about why they were causing damage, mounting a passionate and detailed breakdown of what they were doing wrong (sometimes getting them cancelled as a result). He provided better coverage of a lot of issues (police brutality in the pre-BLM days comes to mind) than any "real" news. His show invented the technique -- still not common in broadcasting, for whatever stupid reason -- of playing the clip of a politician saying something had never happened or they never said something, and then right after that, playing the clip of them saying it. "Real" journalists actually had conversations with him about the technical setup that enabled The Daily Show to do that, which because of the nature of the technology at the time actually wasn't straightforward (as weird as that sounds today).
In the modern day, he got heavily involved in a fight for health care for 9/11 first responders, he had enough integrity to get cancelled from Apple because they wanted to dictate his coverage of China, and now, of course, he's directly doing interviews with important people where he (still) is doing a lot of the things he is saying he wishes the other media would do.
And risks reversing it all for the sake of “both sides”-ing the discourse.
There’s a grievance liberals have that is being exploited for the sake of balance and it doesn’t help John’s past work to pretend democracy isn’t literally in the ballot.
He’s great provided the decade isn’t current. Right now I don’t see any humor in ridiculing Biden’s age and parroting GOP talking points.
He retired, quit. And still he came back to say these things, add to our discourse. He didn't have to. He could have wondered off to an island and fucked off forever.
And OP added so much more. I don't know what more you want from the man.
It's easy to forget how fucking good John Stewart is. A while back I watched some of his shows from the 2000s on police brutality, climate change, real pertinent issues like that, and it's palpable how accurately he gets to what's really going on (which isn't a real big priority for most of the news) and how much it frustrates him the general poor state of the news in the US.
I absolutely loved having him go on Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson and have big arguments with them. It's like for a weird little moment, the US had some journalism in its mainstream political discourse.
My landlord is a 9/11 first responder firefighter. Jon Stewart is the reason Congress passed support for the breathing problems he’ll have for the rest of his life as a result of saving lives that day.
