Front Burner - Jon Stewart is back. Does America still need him?

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

When Jon Stewart stepped down as host of the Daily Show in 2015, it seemed pretty conclusive. For nearly 16 years, he guided the show through 9/11, the Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis and more, becoming a voice of reason for many amid growing political divisions — but it was time to move on.This week saw him back in the host's chair once again, where he'll now be every Monday. But things have changed a lot in the last nine years — especially politics. Does Stewart's brand of Bush-era both-sides-ism still work in 2024? Slate writer and senior editor Sam Adams unpacks the legacy of the Daily Show and whether the world still needs it.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcriptsTranscripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, Damon here. So for the past five months, I've been keeping this chair warm for Jamie and time has just evaporated. It's time for her to come back. She's back next week. Before I go, I just want to say it's been a real pleasure getting to talk to you every day and I really appreciate you listening.

And I want to say, welcome back, Jamie. I'm looking forward to listening to you every morning. And I also want to say to the crew here, thank you. You guys work tirelessly to make this thing what it is. And it's, it's really, really good. It's been an absolute pleasure to work with you guys. Everyone should be so fortunate to work with such good people. Thanks. And now let's get on with the show. From the most trusted journalists at Comedy Central, it's America's only source for news. This is The Daily Show with your host, Jon Stewart. That's the studio audience losing their minds earlier this week after Jon Stewart returned to the host seat of The Daily Show. Thank you. Welcome. Welcome to The Daily Show.

My name is Jon Stewart. Now, where was I? Stewart, of course, guided the show to the peak of its popularity during the 2000s. In the wake of 9-11, it was an anxious and uncertain time. And for a lot of folks, Jon Stewart seemed to be the only person on TV calling out how patently absurd the political realm was getting.

I was not elected to serve one party. You were not elected. I hit a nerve. By the time Stewart finally stepped down as host in 2015, some of his critics felt that American political discourse had become so divided and so deeply weird that his comedic approach maybe just didn't work anymore. It's only gotten more divided since then, and more deeply weird. So why is Jon Stewart returning to the job now? Is this just a nostalgia play, or does the show genuinely have something to say about

the current political moment? We're going to talk about this with Sam Adams. He's a writer and senior editor with Slate. Hey, Sam, it's great to have you back on FrontBurner. Thanks for coming on. Oh, thanks for having me again. Okay, so Jon Stewart is back as a host of The Daily Show. When you first heard he was coming back, what went through your head?

Well, I mean, my first response was shock. My understanding was that Jon Stewart had made it quite clear over the last nine years that he had no intention of coming back to The Daily Show. There seemed to be sort of an orderly plan of succession in place where Trevor Noah was going to leave and be replaced probably by Hasan Minhaj. And then that all blew up thanks to a New Yorker expose about sort of inaccuracies in his stand-up comedy and performance. Minhaj's act often includes experiences that he says he's faced as an Asian American and Muslim American. But the comedian tells The New Yorker many of those stories either didn't happen to him or they were embellished. So we found ourselves in the situation where all of a sudden the new guy

was the old guy. What was your emotional response? Were you happy about this? Were you perplexed? Were you indifferent? Yeah, I think I had probably a number of different feelings at the same time. I mean, like a lot of people, I loved The Daily Show when it was on. I have missed it on some level. The nostalgia factor of having Jon Stewart back on my television, back on my web browser is very powerful. At the same time, the world has changed a lot since 2015. And based on some of the things that Stewart has been doing in the interregnum, there was a real question on my and a lot of other people's part, whether he would be up to the task, whether he would be able to adjust to and fit into this new context. And having seen the episode that he did on Monday, that question is still not answered for me. So I want to get into that, you know, the media environment and the political environment that's

changed since he's gone and then come back again. But let's focus in on Monday Night Show, the first show. He's back in the host chair. He did a very Jon Stewart rip of Biden and Trump in their age. They are the oldest people ever to run for president, breaking by only four years the record that they set! The last time they ran! You know, and I watched it. I got some laughs. I thought it was funny. But let's go into the show a bit. What did you think of it?

Well, he, as they say on the internet, he made some points. He started off with some kind of, you know, lowball Super Bowl jokes just to get everybody warmed up, ease himself back into the chair, so to speak. Kansas City Chiefs are world champions, which means the decades-long plot in which Travis and Taylor brainwash America into getting routine vaccinations is complete. And then his main segment was about this special counsel report that came out at the end of last week, basically suggesting in wasn't even the thrust of it, but devoting a lot of its wording to suggesting that President Biden's mental faculties are failing, that he is sort of an old man whose memory is going and therefore raising a lot of

people's questions. And what's already one of the biggest issues in the upcoming elections is just that Biden's age is really a factor. Many American people have been watching and they have expressed concerns about your age. That is your judgment. That is your judgment. Boom! He took them to the house! He was all over it! Joe Biden, taking nerves! You didn't, no, no, no, don't stop. Wait, hold on. Hold on, sir, don't. No, you killed this. Take the W. You know, Stewart walked through that. He walked through. He compared it to the sort of more surreal, I guess, cognitive lapses have taken part on that you see in kind of Donald Trump's behavior, including most recently suggesting that if Democrats win the next election, they're going to rename the state of Pennsylvania. We have to win in November or we're not going to have Pennsylvania. They'll change the name. They're going to change the name of Pennsylvania.

I can't believe I've lived in New Jersey this long and have been mispronouncing Pennsylvania. Apparently the emphasis is at the end of the line. You know, you have a competition going on between two very old men, as Jon Stewart pointed out, the oldest presidential candidates in history, breaking the record set four years ago by the same two presidential candidates and defending on his part the legitimacy of questioning whether they are sort of mentally, physically up to the job. Yes, it should be noted while concerns over any president's fitness and acuity are legitimate, especially those at an advanced age, Biden's opponent also seems to live at the villages. So...

And, you know, this is sort of the classic Jon Stewart. This is both what people liked he did before and what people worried he would fall back on, which is this kind of both-sides-ism, false equivalency. Is it really the same thing if an 81-year-old man fluffs a date and his 77-year-old competitor is spouting these complete delusions in the midst of very deliberately putting forth these conspiracy theories about election fraud,

border crossings, and so on and so forth. So he's trying to occupy this reasonable middle, which is what people really clung to. He is sort of, I think one of his most vital functions was this kind of like an emotional support animal for political centrists. He really made it feel okay to be in the middle there, but not sure that that is left to occupy. What's the reaction been like online? What are folks saying about this first show? I've seen a really pretty wide range of reactions, both from

TV critics and just kind of regular people online, friends that I've talked to as well. I mean, people are very glad to have him back. I think there is that nostalgic glow of, hey, like the good teacher's teachers back is definitely carrying people through some of them more would seem back and kind of, in this very polarized and unequal political climate, still try to occupy this elusive middle, try to kind of both sides the issues and, you know, be sort of try to take the position of the neutral referee.

And it's not clear that that is either a tenable or satisfying position for someone of his stature to occupy at this point. It doesn't really feel like we just need a grownup to come into the room and calm everybody down. Let's go back to 1999 when Jon Stewart takes over the Daily Show as the host. For those who were listening who maybe weren't around or weren't watching and weren't actively following the show at the time, why was it such a big success? Well, it was a big success for a number of reasons, one of which is that it was so unexpected. It was a big success for a number of reasons, one of which is that it was so unexpected. Jon Stewart pointed out when he retired from The Daily Show after 16 years that it was the longest job – the longest he'd ever held a job by, I know, funny, snarky, satirical news show on a little watched cable channel. Nobody really had any expectations for it. But, you know, it pretty quickly evolved into one of the sharpest places for media criticism anywhere

in the political landscape, including not just television, but print radio anywhere. Americans were greeted this week as liberators. The bad news, the country was Albania and we've never invaded. Yes, to get a pleasant reception, the president only needed to fly to a country referred to as the poor man's Kazakhstan. He was someone who would kind of sort through all the discourse, all the, you know, sort of mainstream news reports, which increasingly felt like they were being gamed by bad faith actors on, we'll say, both sides. You know, he would sort through that. He would tell you what mattered, what didn't. And he would, more importantly, kind of tell you how to feel about it.

This is not something you need to worry about. When he told you something actually was that bad, you actually did need to be upset about this. That really came with a certain moral weight. So, I mean, a lot of the success, I think, had to do with the climate he's in. And I want to talk about that, I guess, in two ways. There's the political climate, right? This is like the post 9-11 years, the war on terror, invasion of Iraq, but there's also the media climate. So how much of this had to do with the political climate at the time? Well, yeah, I think a lot of it had to do with what was going on in American politics, which is also sort of intimately linked to what was going on in American journalism. You had political figures, prominently Dick Cheney for me in the Bush administration, really concentrating on sort of using their own channels, communicating directly

to people, bypassing the news media. And this is sort of famous New York Times article had it creating our own reality. So these were people who would just act as if reality was whatever they wanted it to be. And when questioned about it or called it on the media people who would just act as if reality was whatever they wanted it to be. And, you know, when questioned about or called it on the media, they would just stonewall, they would just say the same untrue thing they had said before, or alternatively say that they had never said the untrue thing that they were on tape saying and essentially forcing the kind of mainstream news anchors to appear partisan by saying, okay, what you just said is a lie. And there's proof of that. Like you said, you didn't say this thing, you said it on camera. That's right. And this is a lot of like a lot like classic Jon Stewart is portraying that hypocrisy, right? Like doing a montage of the number of times that a political, you know, person has said, you know, betrayed the thing they just said, right? Like clip after clip after clip, that's like a mainstay of The Daily Show.

The choice is disarming him by war or letting him have these weapons of mass destruction. You're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon. By the way, you can have all these memorable screw-ups and more. Just call now and order. Now that's what I call being completely f***ing wrong about Iraq. Yeah, he would call a lie a lie,

and that was really something that it felt like no one else was, certainly no one else in his position was willing or able to say at the time. I mean, a really a major turning point in the place both Daily Show and Jon Stewart occupied in kind of the American political landscape was the first show that he did after the September 11th attacks. This is our first show since the tragedy in New York City. And he started at his desk with a long sort of emotional, non-comedic monologue where he just basically gave you the sense that he didn't know what was going on either. He didn't know how to feel. He was as disoriented as everyone else was. He wasn't just going to get to the jokes. He wasn't going to be like a TV anchor and just pretend that everything was back to normal. He was willing to be as sort of uncertain and freaked out, almost near tears

on the air as really everyone felt at the time. Any fool can destroy. But to see these guys, these firefighters, these policemen and people from all over the country literally with buckets rebuilding. That that is. That's extraordinary. And that's why we've already won. It's democracy. It's it's we've already won. They can't shut that down. And I think that really established him as someone who would, you know, say the things that other people wouldn including myself, to be premised on at least insufficient information and what we now know was deliberately falsified information. the mainstream news was either, you know, the New York Times sort of, you know, famously bought into that false line of reasoning and other places were sort of hedging and saying, well, we don't know. And Stewart was the one who was saying, no, this isn't true. And people are against the war, even though they're kind of not, you know, protests aren't being seen on the

nightly news. So he, you know, it felt like an outlet for that. Well, at the same time, he's never a political radical or sort of anti-establishment figure. And when Baghdad fell, he sort of famously, again, tried to occupy the middle and was like, look, if you're glad that all these people have been killed, there's something wrong with you. But if you're not a little happy that this country has been liberated, you also need to kind of check your priors. That is sort of classic Jon Stewart, where he's kind of trying to bring people together, look at things in a calmer, nonpartisan way, which felt both sort of censoring and gratifying. And then also, you know, inevitably just having people kind of unsatisfying.

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increasingly for, you know, more and more political figures to try and connect with sort of largely millennial audience that had grown up on and also also sort of older viewers. I mean, when Jon Stewart retired, one of the people who Bill Clinton asked, well, where am I going to get my news from? So, you know, it felt like everybody watched it. And you ended up, you know, with people like Obama in the middle of the campaign coming on the show, because he valued that audience. Why do you do a show like this? What's in it for you? You know, first of all, I'm a fan, because I think that John is able to break through a lot of the silliness of a campaign season. The other thing is you've got a different audience. And part of our campaign is about getting people who haven't been involved in the process involved in the process.

This is a wonderful venue to do it. So it certainly became politically influential in that sense. So it certainly became politically influential in that sense. Whether or not people actually changed their behavior because they might get cut out on The Daily Show, I don't know. I mean, that's a lot to ask of a half hour show that's on four nights a week on a TV channel that's mostly devoted to stand up comedy and now reruns of The Office. So I don't know that it's really entirely fair to sort of hold the TV show to that account. I mean, Jon Stewart hasn't done, didn't do what no one else has also been able to do. So he just failed in the same way that everyone else failed and no one else, no one has been able to figure out how to do things differently. figure out how to do things differently. But, you know, the show did hold out this kind of hope that it might be able to make things better. It was a place where it felt like for half an hour, four nights a week reason would prevail. And that just didn't turn out to be as contagious as some of us might have hoped. Yeah.

I mean, but he did. I mean, it did have an impact, though, right? Like, maybe it's not fair to say a political political impact but it certainly had an impact on the media. Like there's – I mean there's a couple of things he's famous if not infamous for. There's his appearance on CNN's Crossfire during the 2004 election, right? And so he's on there. He's basically doing his Jon Stewart thing with Tucker Carlson who's one of the co-hosts. When you have people on for just knee-jerk, reactionary talk.

Wait, I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny. No, no, I'm not going to be your monkey. And, you know, after that appearance, CNN's presence cancels the show and fires Tucker Carlson, right? And that was attributed to Jon Stewart. Right. Well, yeah, because one of the things he did during that appearance is he made this emotional appeal. He didn't just say, you know, you guys are full of it. This is just political theater. He said, you're hurting America.

Right now you're helping the politicians and the corporations. And we're left out there to mow our lawns. You just said we're too rough on them when they make mistakes. No, no, no. You're not too rough on them. You are part of their strategies. You're partisan. What do you call it?

Hacks. Wait, John, wait. You know, this is actually bad for the country. And I think that was kind of unquestionably true. The replacing political debate with sort of puppet show blood sport is, I mean, that is so much of what politics is now. You know, Jon Stewart was the one who said, you know, don't do this. This is bad. And I think, you know, some people grew a sense of shame and stopped doing that. But some people so let's talk about why john stewart left the daily show yeah i think there are probably a lot of reasons for it some of which he was explicit about some of which are speculative

i mean he had been doing the job for a tremendously long time at that point might have just felt it was time to step aside and hand the microphone to someone else. It also seemed in a lot of ways that the show had both been surpassed by its descendants, you know, the John Olivers and Samantha Bees, and also that the political climate had kind of outgrown it when you had, and this was after Stewart was off the air, but I think you saw this coming when you have things like Donald Trump in the first debate, you know, tweeting about sex tapes and then being asked about them on the internet. I never said anything about a sex tape while that tweet was like still sitting up on his Twitter account at the precise instant that he said that. The whole technique of kind of calling out hypocrisy, showing that people were saying things that they knew not to be true, only works if the people saying those things have an ability to be shamed.

And the 26th campaign was sort of a post-shame campaign. They would just kind of keep saying it and that. And I think maybe Jon Stewart felt like that power was waning as well. But I think he was also just – had been doing it a long time had already taken a hiatus from the show to direct his first movie and then quit to go and direct his second um yeah i think he among other things just got tired of doing a job he'd been doing for 15 years at that point so we're we're well into the post-shame era now uh the world's a different place uh his uh john stewart Stewart superpower that he had during the golden era of The Daily Show might not work anymore. So I guess the question is, and I know

you were alluding to this earlier, but is Jon Stewart still relevant? I would not say that the first show back made him feel especially relevant or necessary to the discourse going on. I don't know if it's possible for him to outpace the discourse, which is so much faster and denser than it was even nine years ago. One of the things that's really notable about the approach that John Oliver has taken, for example, is that they do sort of long form pieces that are off the news cycle. They're not just kind of repeating the same thing that everybody was talking about for the past week. So it'd be interesting to see

if Stewart kind of tries more of that once he's, it's very clear that the audience is coming back for him. The ratings for Monday Night Show were tremendous. So he is certainly relevant in that sense. He is being watched in a way that the show has not been watched for years. What he's gonna to do with that platform and what, if any impact it's going to have, I don't know yet. We were talking about,

you know, as I was preparing for this, I was initially like, oh, this will be fun. It'll be a cool entertainment story about an enjoyable topic. And then we started talking at the office and like, you know, talking so much that I almost actually missed my train yesterday because it's super interesting. So really, I guess what we were talking about much that I almost actually missed my train yesterday because it's super interesting. So really, I guess what we were talking about, if I can summarize, is we were talking about the role of satire, right? And there's two parts to that, which we've kind of alluded to. There's the entertainment part and then there's the social political criticism, right? So, you know, clearly he's always been entertaining.

But I think there's like, there's been a lot of debate about the efficacy of that second point, like the extent to which his political satire is effective or meaningful. Was it a useful satire for getting people thinking and engaged or did it fuel irony and cynicism and disengagement and kind of give people like they felt like they vicariously were politically involved and then they didn't actually have to do anything. So I guess I'm curious to get what your take on it is. Like how effective was The Daily Show? Right. I mean, I think that is certainly in retrospect. And as Jon Stewart is coming back, I mean, that's the big question.

That's really the sticky wicket here. Is this his brand of media criticism? Is this educating people? Is this making people more sophisticated viewers of the political discourse? I don't know that, and he's probably not solely responsible for this, but I don't recall 20, 25 years ago, people sort of outside the pundit class, outside the Beltway talking about, for example, sort of political narratives in the way they do now. I think people are, for reasons that don't only

have to do with The Daily Show, but have significantly to do with that. I mean, people are more sophisticated about how these things are constructed, about why politicians say things in a certain way in order to reach certain constituencies or to build certain realities for themselves. It's hard to know those things and not be more cynical about the process. That cynicism is quite well deserved and earned, but it can also be disempowering. It inevitably does make it feel like it's much harder to know what is really going on. One of the things he did Monday night is he stressed after doing this bit about, you know, the sort of, you know, political theater about the aging candidates. He then delivered this very straightforward speech in favor of just sort of

everyday political civic engagement. If your guy loses, bad things might happen, but the country is not over. And if your guy wins, the country is in no way saved. I'm not saying you don't have to worry about who wins the election. I'm saying you have to worry about every day before it and every day after. Forever. You know, changing the world, changing the country is a get up and clock in every day kind of job. It is not just something you do on November 5th. That's an important message. It's also whether or not that's actually going to get people up off their couches or stepping away from their laptops and doing anything effective. I don't know, but that is hopefully is the end game here. But it's not clear that he did that before or that he can do that now.

here. But it's not clear that he did that before or that he can do that now. The criticism of his voice is that, and you mentioned it before, is that he's kind of a vaguely liberal, both siderism-er. He'll find a neutral or an aloof place to stand and he can snipe at everyone, regardless of what side of the political spectrum they're on. Do you think that there's still room in 2024 to find that neutral ground with all the increased polarization and partisanship? Are we beyond that? disempowering cynicism that, and I hesitate to use phrases like that, but it does feel like they, whoever they are, want us to feel. You know, the political environment is definitely measurably more polarized than it has been in decades, if not ever. But also, you know, there are a lot of Americans who feel whether or not they're correct, who feel like they're in the middle, who feel like they're sort of reasonable voters who could go one way or the other. You know, and Jon Stewart, I think, has the power to speak for and more importantly to

them. It does feel very old-fashioned in a way. There is something a little kind of Jimmy Stewart about it. But maybe that's something we shouldn't stop believing in no matter how elusive it feels. It's a, it's a, I,

something that I feel very conflicted about and the show, you know, doesn't, doesn't resolve for me, but maybe that's maybe it's not the worst thing to, to rethink that. All right, Sam,

thanks so much for coming on and talking about this. It's been really fun. Oh, thank you so much. My pleasure. All right, that's it for today. FrontBurner was produced this week by Jyotish and Gupta, Matt Mews, Allie Janes, Sarah Jackson, and Derek VanderWijk. Sound design was by Mackenzie Cameron Music is by Joseph Chabison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chow. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos. And I'm Damon Fairless. Thanks for listening.