Lisa Rogak - Angry Optimist

In the wake of Crossfire, however, some other members of the media were beginning to publicly take issue with Stewart’s constant finger-pointing and his harangues directed toward them and their supposed lack of integrity.

“The Jon Stewart backlash should start right about now,” said Wonkette founder Ana Marie Cox after news of the cancellation hit. “Stewart has pretty much painted a target on his chest with his Crossfire appearance. To say his is just a comedy show is a cop-out in a way. He’s gotten so much power. So many people look to him that you can’t really be the kid in the back throwing spitballs.”

“Jon gets to decide the rules governing his own activism and the causes he supports and how often he does it,” said Brian Williams, anchor of the NBC Nightly News. “And his audience gets to decide if they like the serious Jon as much as they do the satirical Jon.

“He has chronicled the death of shame in politics and journalism, and many of us on this side of the journalism tracks often wish we were on Jon’s side,” Williams added. “I envy his platform to shout from the mountaintop. He’s a necessary branch of government.”

Veteran newsman Ted Koppel also stepped into the fray. “Jon feels [journalists] should be more opinionated, not less, and he feels I have a responsibility to get in there and tell the public, ‘Look, this guy is lying’—although maybe not quite that blatantly,” he said. “I disagree with that only in part. In a live interview you can say, ‘That doesn’t sound right,’ but you don’t automatically have all the facts at your disposal. Jon is really profoundly concerned and angry about real issues, but a satirist gets to poke and prod and make fun of other people, and when you say, ‘What about you, dummy?’ he says, ‘I’m just a satirist.’”

For Stewart’s part, at this stage in his life, all the criticism just tended to roll off his back. “I really feel like I have gotten to this weird place where rejection is a good kind of pain,” he said. “Like you get a shot to the ribs sometimes and you go, eh, I’m alive, you know what I mean? Like you get to a certain baseline where you feel confident in your ability to do that tiny little thing that you do. And the other stuff that you’ve been allowed to do is sort of gravy, and if it doesn’t work out, that’s really all right.”

Some serious journalists continued to cheer him on. “Jon Stewart doesn’t claim to be a journalist, and when he says he’s not we should believe it,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “His interviews are in the tradition of Johnny Carson, where he’s polite, at times deferential, and behaves in the interviews like a well-brought-up young man.” In Thompson’s view, that’s where they part company and Stewart morphs into something totally unique. “When all the news guys were walking on eggshells [during the Iraq war], Jon was hammering those questions about WMDs. That’s the kind of thing CNN and CBS should have been doing.”

Even the formidable Bill Moyers, a veteran newsman who served as press secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson before launching a decades-long career in political journalism in network news and public broadcasting, weighed in with effusive praise that was unusual for him. “When I report the news on this broadcast, people say I’m making it up, but when Stewart makes it up, they say he’s telling the truth,” said Moyers. “When future historians come to write the political story of our times, they will first have to review hundreds of hours of a cable television program called The Daily Show . You simply can’t understand American politics in the new millennium without The Daily Show .”

As the presidential campaign of 2004 ran on, the lines between real and fake news continued to blur in Stewart’s world, as well as on the show.

First, John Edwards went on the show to announce his presidential candidacy. Stewart quipped, “We are a fake show, so you might have to do this again somewhere.”

Then Stewart announced that he planned to vote for John Kerry. While it wasn’t a total surprise given that the most frequent targets on the show happen to be Republicans, the fact that he aired it in public made it appear to be an endorsement coming from not only him but the show, which was an unusual move.

“There’s no question that at a certain point that we were leaning toward a certain election result,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we thought one side was pure and the other evil. If you watched this show and didn’t know I was voting for Kerry you’re clearly not paying attention to the show. But if you think that by announcing it that I’ve lost my credibility as a comedian, I just didn’t think we had any credibility to lose.”

Even though he continually maintained that he had no power, it was crystal clear that he wished to have an impact on the business-as-usual politics and the media. However, to his great dismay, both just dug in their heels and became more entrenched, sensationalistic, and polarized. On the show the night before the 2004 presidential election, he had this to say:

“Tomorrow when you go to the polls, make my life difficult. Make the next four years really hard, so that every morning all we can do is come in and go, ‘Madonna is doing some kabbalah thing, you wanna do that?’ I’d like that. I’m tired.”

Perhaps as the result of the combination of all of these things, an interesting thing happened: Stewart was no longer the funniest guy on the show, the clown. He morphed from the zany one on the show and turned into the calm one, the occasionally austere older anchor while all around him the—mostly younger—correspondents acted out of turn, went for the cheap joke or visual or pratfall. Though he may deny he is anything but a comedian until the day he dies, Stewart had turned into an authority figure along the way.

The Daily Show had made a star out of its host, and now the same thing was starting to happen with its correspondents.

After the success of his costarring role as Evan Baxter in the 2003 Jim Carrey movie Bruce Almighty, Steve Carell was already getting more movie and TV offers from Hollywood. He left The Daily Show in the spring of 2004 to begin work on the American version of The Office, based on a popular BBC series, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, a movie that would be released in 2005. After Carell’s departure, Colbert became the next in line, but it was clear that Stewart wasn’t going anywhere soon.

However, in addition to his hosting and producing duties, Stewart was actively searching for new projects for his Busboy Productions to take on. He had recently signed a deal with Comedy Central to pursue new projects, and they didn’t have to look far.

And then just like that, it was Colbert’s turn.

“At that time, he was a total rock star among correspondents,” said Bob Wiltfong. “When any of his stories ran, there was a huge reaction from the audience. The feeling among the rest of us was, why is this guy still on the show?”

Besides, Colbert was getting restless. “I couldn’t imagine how much longer I could do it,” he said. “I still liked it, and I didn’t want to not like it.”

“If your name’s not Jon Stewart, there’s only so many places you can go on The Daily Show ,” said executive producer Ben Karlin. “Steve Carell and Steve Colbert were the first two we identified as giant talents with breakout potential, but we didn’t have the mechanism in place when Steve Carell started getting offers, so he left. With Stephen, we didn’t want to have him go off and become a huge star without working with him.”