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Jon Stewart

Stewart takes away our 'Daily' news

Robert Bianco
USA TODAY
Hillary Clinton reacts to a quip by Jon Stewart, who is signing off 'The Daily Show' by year's end.

Jon Stewart has just forced millions of people to find a new way to end their day.

On the same night that NBC Nightly News viewers learned Brian Williams was facing an unpaid six-month suspension, fans of The Daily Show got even worse news: Jon Stewart announced he would be leaving his four-day-a-week Comedy Central series by the end of the year.

That's not just worse news for them; it's worse news for TV, and for civic and comic discourse. Williams can be replaced, and already has been: Those who don't want their news from Lester Holt can find other alternatives all over the dial. But there was only one Stewart, and one Daily Show. The Colbert Report came close, but it's gone; The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore may someday get there, but it hasn't arrived yet. John Oliver and Bill Maher's opinions are reserved for those who pay for HBO. As for the other late night offerings, they're just talk — some of it smart, but almost all of it insubstantial.

For more than 15 years, Stewart's Daily Show has offered something you could find nowhere else, a heady blend of conversation-setting satire and straight-out, sometimes surprisingly tough newsmaker interviews. And at the center was Stewart, a master both of the long, bitterly funny screed and the sudden, perfectly-timed double take.

That Stewart is funny and intelligent is a given, but funny, intelligent people are less rare on TV than some people think. What he brings to the medium that is rare for comics these days is passion, devoid of either excess anger or irony. There's a sincerity to Stewart's humor that sets it apart from the everyone's-a-target monologues you'll find everywhere else on late-night TV, and a sense that he will not mock those he doesn't believe deserve to be mocked.

In this age of splintered viewership, Stewart has gathered an audience that most likely agrees with him — but you never get the feeling he's shaping his arguments to please them, or keep them. And if those arguments tended to slant in one direction, well, anyone yearning to lean the other way has 24 hours worth of slant at Fox News at their disposal.

What Stewart offers his viewers night after night is talent, skill and guts; what he gave Comedy Central was influence — an ability to shape opinion, particularly among the young, that few can match. A combination like that, you hoped would run forever.

How sad to hear that it won't.

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