And as The Problem With Jon Stewart makes clear, funny one-liners and five-minute chats with pliant celebrities aren’t particularly good practice for roundtable conversations with policy experts and extended interrogations of polished CEOs. An early episode that described the U.S. armed services’ continued use of toxic burn pits near military bases culminated in a tense, misbegotten interview with President Biden’s VA secretary, Denis McDonough. Stewart spent 10 minutes repeating himself, grandstanding in circles, arguing with a broken system, and blaming it on the guy who was mere months into the job and was patiently trying to explain the obstacles in his path. If Stewart’s goal was to make his audience feel sympathy for a federal bureaucrat, he nailed it.
More than once already, Stewart has dedicated an entire episode to a subject, only to have an actual expert on that subject call him out for getting it wrong. The first time, a Wall Street Journal editor took exception to the mess Stewart made trying to summarize the GameStop saga—and, seriously, go watch the episode if you want to understand it less than before you watched—and to his portrayal of Redditors as folk heroes schooling the elites. Days later, Stewart got aired out by a Gimlet Media climate-change reporter for having argued, incorrectly, that recycling doesn’t work (plastic recycling doesn’t work; paper and metal recycling work great) and for going too easy on oil companies.
Because this is 2022, Stewart responded by inviting both reporters onto his podcast to hash it out some more. He seemed to bridle against the Journal editor’s suggestion that he was being naive about GameStop, so he doubled down, ranted about the need for more transparency around extremely private financial transactions, then did the Tucker Carlson thing where he accused the journalist of being the naive one. At least with the climate reporter, Stewart conceded his mistakes and wound up having the kind of detailed, enlightening conversation that it sure would’ve been nice to see on his new television show.