This article is part of The Poynter 50, a series reflecting on 50 moments and people that shaped journalism over the past half-century — and continue to influence its future. As Poynter celebrates its 50th anniversary, we examine how the media landscape has evolved and what it means for the next era of news.
Jon Stewart had been helming Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” for almost six years when he appeared on “Crossfire,” a nightly CNN show that planted guests between co-hosts on opposite sides of the political spectrum. The liberal on this night in 2004, less than a month before incumbent President George W. Bush clinched reelection, was Paul Begala. The consultant introduced Stewart as “either the funniest smart guy on TV, or the smartest funny man.” Several minutes later, Begala’s conservative counterpart, Tucker Carlson, complained Stewart wasn’t being funny at all.
After fielding a few questions about John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president, Stewart wielded an ax, ready to grind.
“I made a special effort to come on the show today because I have privately, and amongst my friends, and also in occasional newspapers and television shows, mentioned this show as being bad,” Stewart said, drawing laughter from the live audience. The camera panned to the people seated in the George Washington University studio, shoulders shaking, eyes squeezed tight, clearly delighted. “I felt that that wasn’t fair and that I should come here and tell you that it’s not so much that it’s bad as it’s hurting America.”
The audience laughed again, but Stewart wasn’t smiling. Carlson started to interject but Stewart continued: “Here’s what I wanted to tell you guys: Stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.”
Begala balked, saying Stewart was criticizing them for being too rough on politicians. Rather, Stewart said, the “Crossfire” co-hosts were “partisan hacks.”
Carlson pounced. He and Begala tried to elicit honest answers from their political guests by asking pointed questions, he said, unlike the softballs Stewart lobbed.
“If you want to compare your show to a comedy show, you’re more than welcome to,” Stewart said. “If that’s your goal, I’d aim for ‘Seinfeld.’”
When Carlson claimed Stewart had “sucked up” to Kerry in a recent interview, Stewart wondered why CNN was looking to Comedy Central for “cues on integrity.”
As Carlson kept pushing Stewart on the kinds of questions he asked Kerry on “The Daily Show,” Stewart deflected, suggesting it wasn’t his role to grill the nominee.
“My point is this,” Stewart said. “If your idea of confronting me is that I don’t ask hard-hitting enough news questions, we’re in bad shape, fellas.”
Begala jumped back in, defending “Crossfire” as a forum for debate. Stewart called it performative posturing.
“How old are you?” he asked Carlson.
“Thirty-five.”
“And you wear a bow tie. And I’m not suggesting that you’re not a smart guy because those are not easy to tie, but the thing is that you’re doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great. It’s not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery.”
Carlson fired back with his own accusation of partisan hackery, prompting Stewart to grow even more agitated.
“You’re on CNN,” he said. “The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls — what is wrong with you? … You have a responsibility to the public discourse and you fail miserably.”
“I thought,” Carlson said, “you were going to be funny.”
But Jon Stewart has often subverted expectations, blending earnestness, activism and even anxiety into the arcs of jokes aimed at people with power and the media establishment. Eventually, he became part of both groups. While he didn’t invent political satire, “The Daily Show” evolved into a trusted source of news under his leadership, especially for some younger Americans who turned to it not just for laughs, but for clarity about what was actually happening in the world. By lampooning news cycle after news cycle, Stewart reframed what reporting could look like and who could credibly relay — as he said opening his first “Daily Show” as host — the headlines.
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Stewart, 62, started performing stand-up in the late 1980s, going on to anchor two MTV shows and acting in movies before he took over “The Daily Show” in January 1999, replacing Craig Kilborn, who had hosted the late-night satirical talk show since its inception in 1996.
Stewart inherited a half-hour format with bits that have endured, like “Your Moment of Zen,” often a funny news clip that closes out each episode. But with Stewart behind the desk, the show veered into more political territory, introducing new segments like Mess O’Potamia, about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and Indecision 2000, coverage of that year’s presidential campaign that dispatched up-and-coming comedians like Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell to the Republican and Democratic conventions.
On Election night, “The Daily Show” went live for the first time with coverage that saw a 44% increase over ratings for election night coverage in the previous presidential campaign. The Indecision 2000 series won a Peabody Award, and “The Daily Show” reprised the segment for the 2004 presidential election. It had become so popular it was luring viewers away from traditional news programs, particularly younger audiences. The Pew Research Center found that year that 21% of Americans aged 18-29 regularly got their campaign news from comedy shows such as “The Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live.”
“For Americans under 30, these comedy shows are now mentioned almost as frequently as newspapers and evening network news programs as regular sources for election news,” the Pew Research Center said, publishing its survey results.
In some senses, these outlets were “The Daily Show’s competitors, and by this point, Stewart had long infused “The Daily Show” with sharp media criticism. After Sept. 11, as the U.S. government was readying for war, traditional TV news outlets were airing sober and sometimes sensational broadcasts declaring “America Under Attack” or “America Hits Back.” “The Daily Show” tagged its coverage with a different label: “America Freaks Out.”
Jon Stewart hosts a taping of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” Monday, Aug. 23, 2010 in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)
“That is so powerful,” said Geoffrey Baym, a former TV news producer and media studies and production professor at Temple University. “That was the only voice at that moment saying, ‘Hey, what are we doing right now? Like, are we thinking clearly? Are we making good decisions at this moment?’”
At the time, ‘The Daily Show’ still wasn’t a well-known program, much less a source of political commentary, Baym said.
“They really stuck their necks out,” he said. “And that was something because they were comedians on the comedy channel.”
Stewart’s ongoing coverage of the Iraq War helped establish the show as a credible news source among Americans disillusioned by traditional news coverage, said Laura Feldman, a journalism and media studies professor at Rutgers University.
“It was a time when the mainstream press was really towing the party line and parroting what was coming out of the Bush Administration, and ‘The Daily Show’ was much more willing to call a spade a spade,” Feldman said.
And so he did on “Crossfire” — “a moment of reckoning for folks in news media and cable news,” Feldman said. When CNN canceled the show a few months later, and cut Carlson, some people credited Stewart. Jonathan Klein, CNN’s president at the time, cited Stewart’s criticism of “Crossfire.”
Sparring with Carlson on “Crossfire,” Stewart deflected the conservative’s attempts to compare his job, which sometimes included interviewing presidential nominees like Kerry, to the work of political journalists. His argument during the appearance could be summed up as such: Stewart was a comedian, and the “Crossfire” hosts, among other TV news anchors, were jokes.
But Stewart was perhaps not yet appreciating that he was both a comedian skewering the day’s news and an increasingly trusted source to deliver that news. Or maybe he was only too aware — and that’s why he was mad.
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Political parody had a long history before Stewart took the reins. “Saturday Night Live” started skewering headlines on its “Weekend Update” sketch in 1975, and “That Was the Week That Was” debuted first in the United Kingdom and then the United States in the 1960s, spoofing politicians.
“But none of that really took hold, and really was the cultural force that ‘The Daily Show’ was,” said Feldman, whose research found in 2011 that young Americans were abandoning traditional news media and seeking election coverage from programs like “The Daily Show.” The boundary between news and entertainment was blurring, as people reconsidered where they could find reliable reporting.
Feldman teaches a course called “News, Entertainment and Politics” that was once focused on “The Daily Show.” No more; students today aren’t watching Stewart, though Feldman thinks he was an important predecessor for a media environment we now take for granted, where serious and factual news can be relayed as entertainment.
President Barack Obama, left, talks with Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show” during a taping on Tuesday, July 21, 2015, in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
“In the early 2000s, what he was doing was really new,” Feldman said. “There was a lot of discourse both in academic literature and the popular press about this news-entertainment hybridity.”
Back then, Stewart regularly joked that he was a comedian “on basic cable,” Baym said. But a basic cable comedy show is significant when you’re reaching a million people a day, piquing the interest of legacy media and interviewing the leader of the free world; Barack Obama became the first sitting president to appear on the show in 2010.
Stewart’s been called “America’s foremost satirist of politicians and the media” and “the GOAT of late night satire.” Today, he’s not pulling the same viewership numbers he once was, even back at the “Daily Show” desk, hosting one night a week. With new and more media, from YouTube to TikTok, audiences have scattered. But among the many options are comedy-news hybrids inspired by Stewart’s “Daily Show,” and not just the ones that have starred his old correspondents, like “The Colbert Report,” “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” and “The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore.” It’s not legacy media, but it’s a legacy.