Sunday's Arts & Style section of The Washington Post has a huge mythic photo of Jon Stewart that looks like a painting. Post reporter Jada Yuan wrote a gushy tribute now that Stewart is receiving the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for comedy, or the "comedy hall of fame," as the Post put it.
The headline was simply "Jon Stewart has more to say." Yuan gushed Stewart was "The comedian who was the country’s moral compass during the Bush and Obama years, the guy with the fake news show on Comedy Central who in a 2009 Time poll was named America’s most trusted newscaster," which says a lot about "news."
At least in one sugar puff, Yuan admitted he was a hero to the liberals:
When he started in 1999, no one expected him to turn a satirical riff on the news into appointment national television, and on Comedy Central, no less.
But he was funny and gave catharsis to a country (well, mostly liberals) grappling with 9/11, the Iraq War, the financial crisis and the rise of 24-hour punditry — in an age before social media, or even YouTube. As distrust in government and media grew, Stewart was where young people turned to make sense of the world.
Denis Leary said Stewart could be goofy and then "wow, that's a complete obliteration of the Reagan AIDS policy he just did." The "moral compass."
Yuan compared Stewart coming back for his Apple TV show like this: "He's Shaun White doing the halfpipe at 35, or Michael Jordan returning to the Bulls after the baseball years."
But something was missing, something that somehow is NOT a "moral compass" moment -- the "What's Wrong With the Media" episode of Stewart's new show, when Stewart ripped the media for its horrible over-selling of the Mueller probe. There was a brief mention of Stewart interviewing former Disney boss Bob Iger (from that episode), but no real mention.
It was, however, mandatory, for the Post to revisit Stewart's rip-roaring attack on Tucker Carlson on CNN's Crossfire in 2004, which spurred the show's cancellation months later. Did he create a monster? Stewart said "Tere's mythologizing as far as, like, a villain origin story...Not even close. That dude has been that dude forever and just found his place. It's not that the crystal found the right home and suddenly the Fortress of Solitude was built. I don't think he's any different than he's ever been."
There was one more note about liberals.
Other late-night hosts have been missed when they left, but none with the urgency of Stewart during the Trump years. He was greeted with raucous cheers and standing ovations whenever he came on Colbert. There was lamentation, sometimes anger among liberals who thought he’d abandoned them in their time of need.
It's that "giving catharsis" thing again, but at least the Post noted Stewart's tribe -- including Samantha Bee and John Oliver and Stephen Colbert -- were doing all that -- even if pretty much none of it was funny as much as angry.
PS: For an opposing liberal take -- that Jon Stewart is over the hill -- see The Atlantic.
