{"id":19655,"date":"2015-05-02T07:00:54","date_gmt":"2015-05-02T11:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=19655"},"modified":"2015-05-01T17:51:51","modified_gmt":"2015-05-01T21:51:51","slug":"memo-to-jon-stewart-join-us-public-radio-is-your-natural-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2015\/05\/02\/memo-to-jon-stewart-join-us-public-radio-is-your-natural-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Memo to Jon Stewart: Join us. Public radio is your natural home."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jon<\/a>

Jon Stewart interviewing former Admiral Michael Mullen on the Daily Show. Photo: US Navy via Wikipedia “Jon Stewart and Michael Mullen on The Daily Show<\/a>” by Chad J. McNeeley.\u00a0\u00a0 Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Okay, let’s get one thing out of the way.\u00a0 Pound for pound, public radio is maybe the least funny media outlet in America.\u00a0 Public radio mostly sucks at humor when we’re trying to be funny.<\/p>\n

But…but…and stay with me here…the one time that we’re sometimes really, really humorous and engaged and laugh-out-loud hilarious is when we’re trying to be deadly serious.<\/p>\n

Listen to an episode of Radiolab or This American Life or the Moth or Scott Simon on a good weekend morning and you’ll find storytelling that captures that most American of art forms, mingling hard truth and satire with a morally grounded sense of humor.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to Jon Stewart.\u00a0 Stewart winds up his culture-changing run as host of the Daily Show this August.<\/p>\n

The truth is, the show has morphed dramatically over the years.\u00a0 The show that’s ending this summer isn’t the show he took over in 1999.\u00a0 It started out with a whole lot of schtick, with Stewart happily playing the jester in the halls of American power.\u00a0 He seemed gleeful.\u00a0 He seemed truly amused by the antics that surrounded him.<\/p>\n

But the last half-decade or so, not so much.\u00a0 The last half-decade, Stewart has oftened seemed angry, disgusted.\u00a0 He wanted laughs, sure, but he wanted answers more.\u00a0 And really, Stewart has been the most engaging and the most hilarious as he’s dug deeper and deeper into the role of actual journalist, interviewing guests with the kind of probative, deeply researched questions that few American reporters can match.<\/p>\n

Watching recently as Stewart dismantled former New York Times reporter Judith Miler — who helped build the case for the Iraq War — I found myself thinking over and over, “Why the hell is this interview happening on late-nite TV?”<\/p>\n