The Most Trusted Name in News

After the taping, in a small room off the studio, Stewart huddled with the team to postmortem the show, which Stewart feels was "a little flat." Some days, he later explains, the show seems to write itself, "then other days it's more of a comedylike polymer that we fashion out of Styrofoam. Styrofoam and rhythm."

Stewart's show has been extravagantly praised everywhere, including by Frank Rich in the New York Times, and it has won five Emmys and a Peabody Award. That the show has accomplished this in a post-9/11 environment where too sharp a departure from the party line can result in losing your job (Bill Maher) or spur a boycott (Dixie Chicks) has largely to do with Stewart's immensely likable personality -- he somehow avoids off-putting snarkiness or self-congratulatory snideness -- but there's another reason. The target of the show's scorn is not merely the mendacity, incompetence or corruption of our elected officials, but the media's refusal to call them out on it. The Daily Show is all about killing the media messenger -- and for anyone who watches the twenty-four-hour news channels, with their unbroken stream of unmediated, unshaped news footage, "breaking news," yelling shows and the bottom-of-the-screen news ticker, it's richly satisfying to tune in at 11 p.m. and see Stewart and his fake news correspondents -- Stephen Colbert, Rob Corddry, Samantha Bee, Ed Helms, Lewis Black and Bob Wiltfong -- viciously satirizing the smugness, obliviousness and hypocrisy of the TV-news crowd.

Since taking over the show from Craig Kilborn in January 1999, Stewart has more than tripled its audience to more than a million viewers a night. But this only hints at his reach. A Pew Research Center survey last spring showed that twenty-one percent of people eighteen to twenty-nine years old get their regular campaign news from the comedians at The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live (ABC News pulls just two percent more of that youth demographic). Much consternation has been expressed by the real media over this supposed dumbing-down of young audiences. Indeed, Bill O'Reilly recently invited Stewart onto The O'Reilly Factor and ripped Stewart's "dopey show" for the power it confers on "stoned slackers" to swing the election to Kerry. But a new Annenberg Center study might startle O'Reilly. "Viewers of late-night comedy programs, especially The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, are more likely to know the issue positions and backgrounds of presidential candidates than people who do not watch late-night comedy," the survey of more than 19,000 adults concluded. Thus can Stewart now cite objective data to prove that he, like Walter Cronkite before him, deserves to be known as the most trusted name in TV news.