Humor is when you know there is little to laugh about in the world and still do it. American comedian Jon Stewart took this to heart when he was still the presenter of Daily Show was there, targeting George W. Bush, American news broadcasts, and the state of the world every night. In 2015, exactly at the moment when American politics finally became unpleasant with Donald Trump’s candidacy for president, Jon Stewart took early retirement and only wanted to deal with animal rescue. He was only 53 years old at the time, so it was foreseeable that he would appear again at some point. The time has come: His new program is now running on Apple + The problem with Jon Stewart, in English with German subtitles.
There will be new episodes every two weeks, each program has a 45-minute topic – at the premiere it was the lack of health care for American veterans in general – and a strange process in particular: Garbage disposal is still not included in army operations planned, so everything is burned – and when soldiers are exposed to smoke containing dioxin, one can imagine that this has health consequences. The burden of proof that they did not poison themselves anywhere else lies with the soldiers. How can it be that one ministry has long since decided that dioxin is carcinogenic and another pretends not to know? Stewart is investigating. There are few different points of view – not even his interviewee in the ministry makes any attempt to defend the position of his authority. It’s not funny.
The fact that Stewart turned the Daily Show into a political satirical show preoccupied several universities
It was Jon Stewart who made it Daily Show a political satirical show when he took over the moderation in 1999, and one can no longer imagine today that this fact actually occupied various American universities. One in Indiana looked at the information content and concluded it was no higher than a mediocre news program, while others looked at how the show had an impact on its audience. In 2006, for example, the political scientists Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan Morris published a study according to which Stewart’s viewers were more cynical than the average American and had a worse opinion of politics; they speculated that this contributed to political frustration. The media scientist Rachel Larris brought up three other studies, one of them from the Annenberg Center, which came to the opposite conclusion, the Daily Show– On the contrary, consumers are particularly well informed and committed.
How is it that someone who was so successful as a comedian that his English-language program was even broadcast on German television for a while thought for years what his next show could be and then presented the world with a very serious political magazine? Stewart said in an interview with the trade journal that he wanted to get involved Hollywood Reporter In other words, dedicate to the area between rhetoric and reality and create new priorities because the perception of what is really important has shifted. He explains this with an example – when he was invited to a show in late 2017 because he was collecting money for autistic children, where he was ultimately asked about the “Me Too” scandal involving comedian Louis CK.
In any case: Jon Stewart always hurled at all the critics who accused him of doing too much infotainment and too little journalism that he was not doing any journalism at all. Media criticism, however, was an integral part of The Daily Show, and it still is, with the new host – American news channels have grown from the right-hand corner with One America News, and the three most-watched news channels, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, show little news and a lot of opinion. Seen in this light, the media critic Stewart’s change of heart is obvious – if the others don’t deliver the journalism, he’ll do it himself. Let’s see how many episodes he can keep behind the mountain with his opinion.