Talk show host Jon Stewart told former first lady Michelle Obama Wednesday he questions whether shows like his have been a net positive or net negative for the country.
On her “IMO” podcast, Obama asked Stewart whether it’s healthy for young people to get their news from “The Daily Show.”
“Do you think comedy helps or hurts the political climate?” she asked. “I wonder what you think, because sometimes I think, ‘Is it good that most young people are getting their news from The Daily Show?’ Or that they — you know — they want you to run for president?”
Stewart began by questioning his show’s impact, saying that late-night shows are becoming a “relic.”
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“We are in some ways a relic of a previous era where it’s sort of like I’m running a Blockbuster, a video store inside of a Tower Records,” Stewart replied, noting social media’s impact and how even his show has had to adapt to it to boost reach. Multiple commentators have noted that the late-night talk show as an entire format appears to have been increasingly outmoded by long-form podcasts.
Stewart went on to note that he has learned not to confuse cultural power with actual power but nonetheless appreciated how cathartic shows like his can be. He said the format feels somewhat “impotent” and possibly like something of an “opiate” for American citizens.
“Is it an opiate?” he asked. “Is it creating a, you know … And having worked on some of those things on Capitol Hill and all that, I know the difference now, which I didn’t before. The difference between activists who are in the trenches doing that day-to-day work, trying to bend that arc of the moral universe slowly towards justice, not realizing there’s a bunch of people trying to bend it back.”
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Stewart said he is curious about what a double-blind study would show about his work.
“Like, does this help? Does it corrode? Does it pervert? Is it something to be — is it ultra-processed, you know, food that’s given the country a kind of political diabetes? I don’t know,” he said.
“I think I also have to step back on — it may not be an honorable thing we do, but we do it as honorably as we can in that it is not in bad faith,” Stewart continued. “So, the way that I try and judge it is, any good faith art, material, speech, talk that goes into the universe, I feel like is a win.
“There’s so much bad faith,” he warned. “But I can’t sit here and honestly answer like, ‘It’s a win for society. What I’ve done over these past 25 years,’ you know, I’d hate to think, obviously, but there’s many people on social media who would tell me, you know, that that is the case.”
Tim Graham, the executive editor of the NewsBusters division of the Media Research Center, agreed that Stewart is right to question what his show has done for political discourse.
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“The concept of Americans getting their ‘news’ from comedy shows is always a terrifying prospect,” Graham began. “Stewart’s right with his metaphor of ultra-processed food. Political comedy’s a Twinkie and not a bran muffin. People can have very distorted views on a comedy-alone diet, like thinking Sarah Palin actually said, ‘I can see Russia from my house.’
“Late-night comedy can be compared to an opiate because their natural audience uses their overwhelming tilt against Trump to get over their anger that Trump won the White House again,” he continued. “In 2024, the late-night shows devoted 82% of their political jokes to Trump and the Republicans.
“It’s a little bit funny that they’re discussing partisan hackery on the Michelle Obama podcast,” Graham added. “The Obamas have been the most fawned-over couple in modern American media history. Late-night comedians never act on the Michelle principle, ‘When they go low, we go high.’”
