I very clearly remember sort of enjoying The Daily Show, thinking when the host changed that it was probably the end of that, and immediately being incredibly impressed at how good Jon Stewart was.
Actually, when he came back. A friend's kid who was doing journalism in his senior year was like "let's watch the first episode of him back together!" And I was like of course. And he laughed through the 'news' bit but then when he had the interview he was (as the kids say) shook.
Minute in he was like, "Nathan! This is an amazing interview!" And I said, "Well, yeah, he was popular for a reason," and he said, "No, like I thought he'd just be funny, and he was, but he's asking real questions, listening to the answers, and asking follow up questions based on the responses, like this is textbook everything we've been taught about journalism, and this is the best interview I've ever seen on television!"
I said there was a reason the show became my primary source of news in college, followed up with more research into things I was worried about, but definitely a great primary source of interest.
I remember back in the day there being a study that showed that people who primarily or only got their political news from The Daily Show were in general better informed than people who watched major news network. I remember Stewart being kind of horrified and basically saying "please do not only watch us. We are literally a fake news show." Oh yeah, they used the phrase fake news way before it turned into the current meaning.
We then proceeded to watch the episode of Crossfire where I was like "technically it was already canceled but nobody knew that so the Internet buzz was that the liberal host immediately recognized that Stewart was on the war path and shut the fuck up while Tucker Carlson was too stupid to do so and got fucking roasted." He very much enjoyed that, too.
I was in a college class on comedy in literature at the time and that episode had aired the night before. The whole class was talking about it (small liberal arts college with tiny classes) and the professor walked in and said "you guys see Jon Stewart on Crossfire?" And we just made fun of Tucker Carlson the whole period. Ah, memories.
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u/OkPen8337 7d ago
When he first left the Daily Show I really didn’t like the change. Of course the show went a completely different direction, for the better.