Without a even a glimpse of warning, Jon Stewart and Brian Williams are both getting the host swarm. Stewart by honors and Williams by opprobrium. An announcement was made on February 10, and we were stunned by this improbable coincidence. The impending departure of Stewart, the host star on Comedy Central, after sixteen years of presenting a parody of TV news coincided with a six months unpaid layoff. The anchorman and presenter at NBC, guilty of having taken some liberty with the truth is heading out. Is this more or less a slap in the face of the heir to the show, having been a once prestigious header to the late night lineup turned endangered presenters squawking off to the masses at last light?
Maureen Dowd, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote in her Sunday column on February 8, which transformed into a wordy missile attack against Williams. The first pillar of a daily show was a satirical evening that imposed itself for nearly sixteen years as a virtual breviary against media-culture. This was not something she hoped to see a second time. It was, indeed, greatly aided by the development of social networks, quick to build an alternative discourse to that offered by the major networks and its daily program has continued to gain fuel by mixing bawdy farce and ruthless dissection through American politics.
Williams can only blame himself for having embellished an episode of its coverage of the invasion of Iraq by the US Army in 2003, having claimed there to be a helicopter forced to make an emergency landing after being hit by a rocket RPG, and more for believing that half a confession would hide his lie. But he might have been better off if NBC had to worry about the audience figures for at least half of its flagship programs, be it the evening news paper like the weekly appointment “Meet the Press.”
The announcement of the departure of Jon Stewart probably delighted American conservatives regularly ridiculed, even if the host does not hide his sympathy for Republican mavericks of the stature of John McCain. In 2010, on a wave Tea Party, Jon Stewart and another star host of Comedy Central, Stephen Colbert, had gathered more than 200,000 people in Washington at a rally to restore common sense or fear. They scratched a rally earlier by a host star of the conservative Fox News, inexhaustible source of inspiration for the Daily Show.
Stephen Colbert became the star of his own program after its ranges like many others from the master of the Daily Show. His Colbert Report was another parody of TV news in which he played a crazy infatuated conservative model. After ending the adventure in December 2014, with all the tributes like Jon Stewart Tuesday in May, Stephen Colbert is taking over from comedian David Letterman at the head of the evening CBS program, Late Show.
Tuesday, neither Jon Stewart nor Comedy Central gave any indication to what he intends to do with his career. Stewart had already deserted the Daily Show to a dramatic film, Rosewater in 2014, adapted from the story of the Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari. He had been imprisoned and tortured in Iran, after an interview with the Daily Show as part of the turbulent re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.