Politics on a skewer

New York

Jon STEWART knows comedians are not supposed to get angry. Angry is not funny. But when he starts talking about the Bush administration’s fondness for demonizing its critics or its refusal to concede an error in judgment, well, he just starts to boil over. “This administration’s inability to admit even the tiniest mistakes for fear of seeming weak is stunning sometimes,” Stewart says, holed up in his office here at “The Daily Show,” feet kicked up on a desk littered with mounds of newspapers, scripts and current political books. “Their unbelievable insistence of their own righteousness -- it’s really wearing on me.”

The handsome 41-year-old “Daily Show” host tries to stop himself, but the pent-up anger keeps seeping out. “Everybody understands, when you’re running a country and you’re in a war, [stuff] happens. But when you’re standing in a pile of [stuff], saying there’s no [stuff] there -- that behavior is remarkably unreasonable.”

To be fair, I’ve caught Stewart at a particularly emotional moment. My visit to “The Daily Show” coincided with White House national security advisor Condoleezza Rice’s appearance before the 9/11 commission. It was high political drama for the nation and a great showcase for Stewart’s peerless political satire. In modern-day politics, truth telling is a precious commodity, which is why “The Daily Show” has become one of the treasures of modern-day television. Armed with a platoon of sharp-tongued writers and clever on-air commentators, Stewart’s mock newscast has done more than just win two Emmy Awards and attract more 18- to 34-year-old male viewers than any network evening newscast. He’s taken a jokey show on Comedy Central -- a cable network that is otherwise given over to frat-house fluff like “The Man Show” and raunchy humor like “Chappelle’s Show” -- and transformed it into must-see TV, home of the most incisive political commentary in the known cable universe.

For young TV viewers, Stewart has something the skybox journalists from the mainstream media sorely lack: fearlessness. Just ask Albert Hunt, the Wall Street Journal’s executive Washington editor and a fixture on CNN’s “The Capital Gang.” Hunt, who teaches a class called “The Press and Politics” at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, recently asked his “political junkie” students where they got their news. Out of a class of 25, two or three watched a network news show. But the vast majority, “at least 80%,” says Hunt, watched “The Daily Show.”

“They really worship at the altar of Jon Stewart,” Hunt explains. “He probably combines entertainment and information better than anyone else in the media today. When the class discusses politics, they always end up talking about how the event was handled on ‘The Daily Show.’ ”

For those of us who’ve become frustrated by the conventional wisdom of the mainstream media and the in-your-face ideology of Fox News, Stewart’s barbed commentary is a whiff of fresh air. Treating American politics as a tacky theater of the absurd, “The Daily Show” does a better job of connecting the dots than most of our real political press. When aides insisted the president hadn’t been in the White House situation room the day after the Sept. 11 attacks -- eager to undermine Richard A. Clarke’s contention that the president had urged him to find a terrorist link with Iraq -- Stewart responded, his voice dripping with sarcasm: “Let me get this straight. On Sept. 12, 2001, Bush didn’t use the situation room? What situation was he saving it for?”

Stewart was in especially rare form after Rice’s day in the spotlight. Like a shrewd prosecutor, he played a clip of Rice telling commission member Richard Ben-Veniste that the presidential daily briefing “did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information.” Stewart proceeded to air a clip of Rice identifying the briefing, saying “I believe the title was ‘Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.’ ”

That got a big laugh from “The Daily Show” studio audience. I expected Stewart to smirk or add a wisecrack. Instead, he did a remarkable thing. He stared at the camera in complete silence for 20 seconds, an eternity in TV. Finally, before covering his face in his hands, he growled an expletive-laced riposte: “You’re ... kidding me, right? Please say, please say, you’re ... kidding me!”

At a time when most of Young America doesn’t vote or read a newspaper, “The Daily Show” has managed to engage its youthful viewers by not pulling any punches -- it gleefully exposes hypocrisy and skewers sacred cows. Fox News has a similar passion and a point of view -- Sean Hannity sincerely believes liberals are appeasing wimps -- which is why it now dominates the cable news spectrum. But Fox’s humorless attack dogs lack Stewart’s sense of the absurd, an indispensable weapon for anyone covering modern-day politics. It’s hardly a coincidence that the biggest influences on Stewart’s writers and correspondents are “The Simpsons,” “Late Night With David Letterman” and the Onion, where both executive producer Ben Karlin and head writer David Javerbaum worked. All three places are steeped in satire, social commentary and a finely honed appreciation for subtext and pop irony.

To their credit, young audiences find today’s poll-driven political culture too depressing to take seriously, having been alienated by poisonous campaign advertising and the cynicism of “Mission Accomplished” sloganeering. Stewart’s audience views politics as kabuki theater. Conditioned by countless hours of sleek commercials and MTV videos, they have a natural affinity for a show that mocks the banal pronouncements that receive respectful cogitation from the mainstream media. (One of the show’s most popular segments is “Great Moments in Punditry,” in which third-graders read transcripts from “Hardball” and “Crossfire” shouting matches.)

It’s hard to say who aggravates Stewart more, the lap dogs of the mainstream press or the Fox pit bulls. “Fox has been brilliant,” he admits. “They’ve created this idea that they are the antidote to other extremists so you can’t attack their extremism. But they lost their minds after Dick Clarke testified. They went back to being the media outlet of the Republican Party.”

When Fox’s John Gibson was on the show last week, plugging his book, “Hating America: The New World Sport,” he criticized foreign news organizations like Al Jazeera for promoting an anti-American political agenda. Stewart’s response summed up his view of Fox News: “It seems to me that Al Jazeera is, in some respects, the clumsy Fox.... You guys have done something in a professional manner that they are, sort of, the high school players at.” He finds the rest of the media feckless, though he uses stronger language. “I watch ‘Crossfire’ every day, and what’s so upsetting isn’t the show itself but the missed opportunity. It just preaches a narrative of adversarialness. Everyone has an act. I mean, why do we pretend that our pundits are not just professional wrestlers?”

Stewart admits that he’s a late-blooming political connoisseur. His idols were Johnny Carson and Jerry Lewis, not Nelson Mandela. “I barely read a newspaper in college,” he says, pointing to the stacks of papers on his desk. “And look at me now.” “The Daily Show” really didn’t find its political edge until the tumultuous aftermath of Bush’s 2000 election victory. After the Florida voter recount and the subsequent Supreme Court decision, says Ben Karlin, “we got to a real turning point. It was obvious the media was just reporting strategy rather than getting to the heart of the issues. We realized that the hypocrisy of politics and the media should be the focus of the show. And at that moment, the show became something else.”

“The Daily Show” doesn’t just say what it thinks; it uses comedy to think about politics in a fresh way. Though Stewart clearly has the Bush crowd in his cross hairs, he takes just as much delight in mocking Sen. John F. Kerry -- the comic has a great ear for the Democrat’s droning voice and soporific rhetoric. And who knows who’ll be a target next week? “That’s what is so great about the show,” says Arianna Huffington, who was on the show Thursday to plug her new book. “When everyone else is offering the same old predictable conventional wisdom, they’re surprising us. Without being preachy or didactic, Jon explains how politics works today.”

“The Daily Show” has a built-in advantage over mainstream media. It doesn’t need access, a weapon the Bush administration, as did its predecessors, uses to freeze out reporters critical of White House policies. Stewart was in New Hampshire during the primary season, rubbing elbows with the press and political operatives, an experience he found profoundly uncomfortable. “When you’re on the inside, you don’t get any perspective or context -- it really affects your judgment,” he says. “When we would talk to the press, off camera, they all said, ‘You guys are all saying what we’re really thinking,’ which is pretty depressing.”

The Big Picture runs Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes .com.