The Most Trusted Name in News

On four mornings a week at 11:30 a.m., Jon Stewart meets in his office with his production team at The Daily Show, the Comedy Central news-parody program that emanates, Monday through Thursday nights, from a down-at-heels brick building on the far fringes of Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan. Stewart, a man whose face somehow blends the hangdog Jewish sadness of a Woody Allen with the blue-eyed handsomeness of a potential movie star, sits behind a cluttered desk heaped with books and newspapers. Onscreen, Stewart is the sober-suited, Windsor-knotted fake anchorman. Offscreen, he's all about casual: Today he's in a gray T-shirt, jeans and an NYPD baseball cap. He's also seriously fried, jet-lagged from a red-eye flight two days ago from the Emmys in L.A. (the show picked up two awards: for Best Variety Show and Best Writing) and from a mobbed two-hour signing last night for the show's best-selling spinoff book, America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy in Action. Plus, he hasn't had a proper night's sleep in eleven straight weeks, not since he and his wife, Tracey, a veterinary technician, had their first baby, Nathan, on July 3rd.

Still, apart from the odd yawn, he looks surprisingly fresh as he rolls a football in his hands and talks with his top lieutenants about the day's show, which will go live to tape in less than six hours. After mulling over how to find an undecided voter for an upcoming bit ("Well," Stewart muses, "you'd have to go out and find a fucking idiot"), he turns to the "headline" item that will kick off tonight's broadcast: the speech that Iraqi interim prime minister Ayad Allawi gave to a joint session of Congress that morning. It has not escaped the notice of Stewart and his team that Allawi's speech had an oddly familiar ring to it. The comedic tone of The Daily Show is all deadpan irony, but the mood behind the scenes is one of intense youthful passion, and even fury. Right now the team's indignation stems from the transparent fact that Allawi's address was a thinly veiled gloss on Bush's stump speech. "That speech was written by the United States," cries Ben Karlin, the show's thirty-three-year-old executive producer. "Yeah," Stewart says, "Allawi literally said, 'It's morning in Iraq.' "

"My favorite one was" -- Karlin adopts a Texas twang -- " 'Iraq is safer, the United States is safer, the world is safer.' They didn't even try to disguise the voice! And I guarantee you nobody is going to call that out!"

And no one does. The network news anchors, and the twenty-four-hour news channels -- CNN, MSNBC, Fox -- all fail to connect the dots on the telltale ghostwriting echoes, which, when you think about it, is a shame. Or a disgrace, given that this was the American public's first opportunity to hear Iraq's interim leader speak with the freedom we attacked his country to guarantee him. Instead, we got a rose-tinted campaign speech for Bush, clearly penned by the people who also put words in the president's mouth. For Stewart and the comedy activists at The Daily Show, this was too much. All morning the show's researchers trawled video of recent Bush speeches and located instances where the president used the precise words that Allawi did ("Iraq is safer," "The United States is safer"), and cut them into a rapid montage. At the 6:30 taping of the show, Stewart played the montage. Then, in a signature move, he shot a bemused look into the camera. "It's almost like the United States wrote the speech," he said, with puzzled disingenuousness. "But . . . that . . . couldn't be? . . ."