The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart finished his 16+ year run of the Daily Show last night with a surprisingly low-key and sweet staff reunion basically, topped off with Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street band. I admit, I teared up a bit.

Stewart ended his run at the top of his game, with good correspondents, a format that really works, and a very insightful and moral way of commenting on events while still making us laugh about them.

In the lead up to the final episode, several guests told him they didn't want him quitting, with Barack Obama even joking that he would sign an executive order forbidding it, but a couple others told him he should run for public office, he laughed that off, essentially saying he viewed it as a perversion of the political process, I think he sold himself short though.

Stewart has always seemed uncomfortable with the very real esteem and influence his show was held in and had, he said he didn't want to be held to the standards he tried to apply to real news programs, because he wasn't running one himself, while that may have been true at the early stages of the show, after 9/11 and his powerful monologue on the first show post break, he became something else to a lot of the country, including most of my generation. By showing grief but still thinking and refusing to lash out blindly, he showed right there that he was following higher ideals than the supposed "professionals" who, in the days following the attacks, fell directly in line with the word from the government, refusing to scrutinize the decisions made in the name of security.

Now, perhaps that says more about the news than it does about his show, but the fact remains that he had a tradition of presenting the news with less spin than the major networks, and he trusted his audience to get the jokes without him having to dumb them down.

In his closing monologue last night, he described how to identify bullshit, it was a funny bit, presented well, but in it he distilled the goal of his show from day one, identifying bullshit fed us by those with an agenda.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was perhaps the only widely watched news program that actually practiced journalism in the way it should be practiced, by finding out what those in power are doing, and translating it from bullshit into something everyone can understand, by bringing into light the things those in power would prefer remain dark. It remains to be seen if his successor can carry on that tradition.

The world is a better place, my generation more educated and aware of events, partly because of his show, we are worse off without him behind the desk, but we are still better for having had him at all.

I hope he has a great time in his post Daily Show life, and hope he truly realizes the respect he has gained from so many over the years is real, and that he earned it legitimately.

This post has been edited, I misspelled Jon, as John throughout despite having the big picture right there telling me how to spell it.