#jonvoyage

If you want a sense of how much Jon Stewart mattered to today’s mediasphere, how deeply his audience identified with him, consider this. We are currently in the midst of an actual evening-news controversy that just knocked Brian Williams out of the NBC Nightly News anchor chair for six months. But when Jon Stewart announced out of the blue that he was leaving The Daily Show later this year—explanation, as we say in the news biz, TK—that felt like the only news that mattered.

Stewart, whose last show is Thursday, can demur as much as he wants that he’s just a fake news guy, a comedian telling jokes, that the credit and attention should go to actual journalists reporting actual news. But we all saw through that joke. Since taking over the show from Craig Kilborn, he became–whether he liked it or not, whether he found it sad or not–the most passionately followed voice in late-night comedy and news alike.

So Stewart wasn’t an actual news anchor. What his show did with comedy was a kind of journalism nonetheless, using satire and some thorough research of source material to analyze the news and analyze its analysis. Any honest media critic knew that Stewart was doing the job better than the rest of us. His show turned TV’s own tools and language against it to spotlight buffoonery, bad faith, hot air, and hypocrisy. Do the same thing in print and you’re an op-ed columnist. Stewart and company simply managed to do it in a format that people paid attention to.

And pay attention they did. Stewart came out on top of a 2009 TIME online poll asking who was the most trusted newscaster in America after the death of Walter Cronkite, and young viewers in particular cited The Daily Show as a top source of information.

Stewart laughed off these accolades too, but he repaid the affection by caring. In his famous 2004 Crossfire appearance, he begged the hosts of the CNN shout show to stop “hurting America”; it is only a fitting sendoff to Stewart that before he left, he got to see that show die not once but twice. His 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity was dismissed by some critics, especially on the left, as mushy “false equivalence,” but it was deeply passionate–albeit passionate about Stewart’s belief, usually frustrated by actual events, that you could apeal to people’s reason and sense of comity. And sometimes the show effected real change, as when he made a cause celebre of a health bill to support 9/11 first responders, after it had been stymied in Congress. Stewart wasn’t a fist-shaker, but an eye-roller, but when he winced, he winced with feeling.

There was speculation on and off that Stewart would move on to something else–indeed that he should move on to something else, because that’s what people do in careers, even though he had seemed to find his perfect calling. He was suggested as a network late night host, directed the movie Rosewater, and last year he was courted by NBC’s Meet the Press, in a move even he seemed to find laughable at the time.

So now it seems he will be going on to something else. But what the hell do the rest of us do? If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that we saw Stewart hand off his show for a summer to John Oliver, who kept it running brilliantly. Yes, Oliver’s an extraordinary talent, but his run on the show was also testament to how well Stewart and his staff had created a show whose voice was greater even than one ridiculously talented person. There are plenty of talented people we can talk about as a replacement later–Sam Bee, Aasif Maandvi–but at some point the idea of replacing Stewart will seem plausible, thanks to the machine he created.

As journalist Chris Smith’s new book, The Daily Show: An Oral History, reveals through interviews with Stewart, his co-workers and other associates, the host was exceptionally close with his staff over the period he worked on the show.

For his 50th birthday, the staff gave him an endearing gift ― “The same exact outfit that he wears every day,” as executive producer Jen Flanz recalled in the book. She continued, “Khakis, gray T-shirt, and the boots, the whole thing. I call it his cartoon character outfit, because in a cartoon, the character wears the same thing every single day.”

But among the book’s numerous recollections ― both positive and negative ― from Stewart and those connected to him, perhaps the most clear through-line is how much Stewart’s co-workers respected his work ethic.

“You’d show up at 9:30 in the morning and his car was already in the garage, and you’d be sitting there at 10:30 at night doing an edit, and he’s walking down the hall to get in his car,” recalled Dan Bakkedahl, who was a correspondent from 2005 to 2007. “The guy gave his life to that job.”

Stewart briefly hosted another show, The Jon Stewart Show, on MTV in the mid-’90s, but the cancellation of that program seemingly motivated him to give The Daily Show everything he had.

“There was a drive to Jon on The Daily Show that he didn’t have on his old MTV show,” said Stewart Bailey, who was a co-executive producer for The Daily Show until 2005 and also worked as a segment producer on Stewart’s MTV show. “His attitude was, ‘I’m going for it on this one. I’m going to leave it all on the table.’ And Jon would come early, he would stay late. We would work on weekends. There wasn’t any half-assing. He wouldn’t let you off the hook.”

Despite the grueling day-to-day schedule, Stewart would make sure to be far more prepared for his shows than you might expect from a satirical news anchor on Comedy Central. “Jon always read the books,” said Hillary Kun, another co-executive producer, referring to the books a lot of guests would come on the show to promote. “He’s a freakishly fast reader.”

Keeping The Daily Show to the level of quality viewers enjoyed was a real sacrifice for Stewart. Chris Regan, a writer on the show from 1999 to 2006, remembered a conversation he had with Stewart in which the longtime host opened up about the toll this job took.

“I went to Jon and I told him I was burned out, and he said to me, ‘You’re burned out? Walk in my shoes one of these days,’” recalled Regan in the book. “It was the most candid he’s ever been with me, just going on about how he’s up all night, looking online, trying to find a new angle.”

Stewart was far from a one-man show, a point Smith’s book fully illustrates with the accounts from both famous and behind-the-scenes staff members. There are many unsung heroes who made The Daily Show into what it became.

While Jon Stewart, just 52, surely has more targets to dismember and more jokes to tell, his 16 years behind The Daily Show desk made him a major figure in the democratic process. No, that's not an overstatement.

After taking over from the uneven Craig Kilborn in 1999, Stewart and his merry band were consistently funny. At the same time, his never-suffer-fools sensibility and his tone — sharp but never cruel, sarcastic but never outright cynical — invented a genre of informed and informative commentary.

Stewart eviscerated CNN or MSNBC stupidity with (almost) as much enthusiasm as he ravaged Fox News. In 2004, he famously appeared on — and helped lead to the demise of — CNN's Crossfire by pleading with co-hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala to "stop hurting America."

While selling himself as in independent voice, his political slant was clearly left of center. And so what? His leanings were clear to viewers, anchored the fun and conveyed that he gave a damn.

And thank God for that.

We at The Daily News extend special gratitude to Stewart for his passionate partnership in a crusade near to our hearts: the fight to provide health care and compensation to 9/11 rescue and recovery workers. At a pivotal moment, Stewart got behind the ailing first responders and helped clarify the national obligations to help them.

Even now, he beats the drum to renew funding for the expiring James Zadroga Law.

We also extend appreciation to Stewart for continuing, with David Letterman, to keep the center of the country's comedic gravity in New York City — even when The Tonight Show, now back home, was out in Los Angeles.

So, we give our salute to you, Jon. For providing laughter, and for helping to produce a better-informed citizenry by, yes, cutting consistently through the crap.