New ‘Daily Show’ Host: I Won’t Just Hammer on Fox News

August 1st, 2015 11:17 PM

In a chat this week with a roomful of TV critics, incoming Daily Show host Trevor Noah upset his liberal audience base by suggesting he’s going to be different than Jon Stewart by hammering less on Fox News Channel in the future.

“News is changing,” Noah said. “The way people are absorbing their news in soundbites and headlines little click links. … The biggest challenge [is] how do we bring all of that together, looking at through a bigger lens as opposed to just going after one course, which was historically Fox News.”

In Saturday’s Washington Post, they published some of TV critic Hank Stuever’s online chat, and they plucked out an upset liberal to lead off the rehash in the morning paper:

Q: He says he's going to harp less on Fox News. Isn't that like ignoring the 5000 lbs of Elephant Dung in the Middle of the Room?

A from Stuever: He didn't really explain his thinking there.

Let me just say this: After watching his comedy routine (some good, some flat) and listening to him deal with TV critics yesterday, I had this strange feeling that in 12 or 18 months I'm going to have to write some kind of "Trevor Noah is leaving Daily Show" story and a "How will [insert replacement name here] fix the Daily Show?" story.

It gives me no pleasure to say that. I hope I'm wrong. I'm keeping a very open mind.

Noah also walked into a little trouble at the Q&A when critics tried to fact-check his stand-up routine, which isn’t normal for comedians who aren’t faking the news:

Q: So he told a story about getting the Daily Show call when he was in Harrods - but he told Seinfeld he was in Dubai.

A. from Stuever:  He has a truthiness problem, which I get into if you read the piece linked in my intro. I mean, all comedians do -- their stories about their everyday lives that they tell on stage aren't meant to be taken as 100% true. Still, though, it seems like he'd be practicing on getting the facts straight if he's going to have an impact on The Daily Show, don't you think?

This is how Stuever relayed it in his story on the Noah meeting with critics:

During Wednesday’s Q&A, reporters pressed him for more details about the anecdotes he told in his act: Which airline decided to fumigate the cabin with “pesticide” (as Noah referred to it) as passengers from Africa were boarding? (He said he couldn’t remember.) How exactly did his traffic stop in Pasadena proceed?

Noah seemed surprised that the previous night’s stand-up routine was getting a fact-checking. “Everything is real that I do in [my] comedy,” he said. “I obviously exaggerate a few things for comedic effect. I got pulled over by a policeman. I did ask him the question, ‘Is it because I’m black?’ but I was panicking at the time … [The airline episode] wasn’t as horrific as I make it sound.”

It was, again, an example of the blurry area between fact and satire that a Daily Show host now occupies.

It’s not as if Noah has been appointed to a nightly newsanchor’s chair, where his personal stories of what he’s seen and what he has heard other people say would come with the reasonable expectation that it’s true.