He’s not one to couch his words

Two seemingly unrelated things have happened lately on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart”: There’s a new set, and the show has gotten great play out of the Karl Rove CIA leak scandal/not a scandal.

The first thing may appear next-to-inconsequential, something for the “Daily Show”-obsessed (see bringbackthecouch.blogspot.com), but you could look at it as Stewart’s way of saying goodbye to an old way of playing the late-night game.

Time will tell, but no couch might very well mean Stewart is acknowledging what even his die-hard fans have often felt -- that the interview segment of “The Daily Show” is a dead zone. It’s when Stewart himself, through his idle sarcasm, signals to the audience that the comedy is pretty much over, cue the chat portion of the show, the politicians and authors, mixed with actors arriving to push their product by shuttle, it seems, after Letterman and Carson Daly, with a layover at Conan.

The new set -- three giant screens behind Stewart, the aforementioned talk show couch gone, so that Stewart’s guest sits with him at the desk -- gives the appearance, anyway, that “The Daily Show” will be a hotter visit, something that might perhaps even evolve (devolve?) into something resembling that show Stewart made hay detesting, CNN’s “Crossfire.”

The alteration to the “Daily Show” brand happened to arrive at the same time the series was in the midst of doing what it does best -- spinning the foibles of cable news and Washington politics into nightly jabs at elitist centers of power. After a flurry of coverage last week, cable news appears to be done for the moment with “Plame/Rove/Uranium/Niger/Whitewater ... gate,” as Stewart mockingly termed it the other night. Do we have a scandal on our hands, cable news seemed to ask? Answer: I don’t know, but let’s keep staring at it, at least until the next Category 4 hurricane.

But “The Daily Show,” which one night called the story “Rove Actually,” was in the meantime feasting off of it, mixing the story’s convoluted and coded elements with easy pop culture references. Stewart and his writers simplified things (it’s what comedy so often does), but in more lucid fashion than so-called serious news. “Stephen, let me ask you this. What is double-super-secret-background,” Stewart asked “Daily Show” correspondent Stephen Colbert (he was playing “Daily Show senior journalistologist” Stephen Colbert) last week.

It was a reference to Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper’s e-mail to editors explaining that he’d spoken to Rove not just off the record but on “double super secret background.”

“Jon, it’s an industry term, a bit of lingo,” Colbert responded. “In essence it’s just like regular background but with no tag-backs, fronties or backsies, taken to infinity plus 1 on opposite day -- circle-circle-dot-dot, now you’ve got a cootie shot.

“Stephen,” Stewart continued, “but if, as the White House says, Karl Rove was just setting the record straight on this, why all the extra secrecy?”

“Because they need it, Jon,” Colbert said. “Whistle-blowers that expose corruption are protected by law, but guys like Rove who are out there just talking [expletive] about another guy’s wife as political payback, they leave themselves wide open.”

Already, Stewart had shown a clip of Rove on TV last summer, telling CNN of the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative: “I didn’t know her name, and I didn’t leak her name.”

“See,” Stewart cut in, “he didn’t leak her name. He said, ‘Wilson’s wife.’ He didn’t even say it was [former ambassador] Joe Wilson’s wife. It might have been kindly Mrs. Wilson, who lived next door from Dennis the Menace.”

On TV, anyway, the Rove story first got visual on C-Span, which last week carried the at-times absurd spectacle of White House spokesman Scott McClellan refusing to comment on a matter that he had already said didn’t involve the White House to a White House press corps that kept asking with increasing vehemence.

Later that night, Stewart played the clips of the press conference stalemate and said, sotto voce, “We’ve secretly replaced the White House press corps with actual reporters.”

It was an easy joke that blew past the complexities of the White House beat, but it got at the free pass that many people feel the Bush administration has received from the press.

Granted, this is a game that can get old and even a little soul-killing, Stewart’s in-studio fans roaring with approval at his every broadside against the evasions, prevaricating and double-speak of the political establishment.

But if Stewart has publicly shied away from the notion that he’s a serious filter of the news for those who don’t follow it, with the Rove affair he has shown a willingness to capitalize on his clout, coming out from behind jokes to say: “So -- incontrovertible proof that the administration was dishonest about their role in this affair. Crime, not a crime -- who cares! They were dishonest.”

One night last week, Stewart’s guest was Bernard Goldberg, author of a book called “100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken is #37).” Stewart let Goldberg get out a bit of his coarsening-of-the-culture argument before interjecting that cultural elites weren’t the problem.

“I’ve been to L.A. and I’ve been to Washington -- they’re the same city,” Stewart said. “The only difference between L.A. and Washington is, they think they have power in L.A. -- they don’t. But in Washington they do have power.”

In the old days, Goldberg would have been on the couch, and maybe Stewart wouldn’t have begun to pick apart his argument with such focus. But in October Colbert will launch his own post-”Daily Show” half-hour news parody, executive produced by Stewart, and it is just possible that Stewart is aware that a core part of his viewership hasn’t hung around much past 11:20.

And so he’s going a little “Nightline,” maybe, although three or four minutes with Billy Bob Thornton plugging “Bad News Bears” is still three or four minutes with Billy Bob Thornton plugging “Bad News Bears.”

Monday night, though, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were on the show, and it mattered that they could both face Stewart, as they talked about Watergate versus this Rove thing. You could almost sense how much the journalist-hero role has been transformed -- from Woodward and Bernstein, rock stars of three decades ago for uncovering White House wrongdoing, to Stewart, the news source for a culture in which all too often information must be distilled as entertainment before it can be safely assumed we’re all paying attention.

“This is about lying,” Bernstein said of the CIA leak affair. “It’s about the president and it’s about the White House and, like it was about Haldeman and Erlichman, this is about Karl Rove. But it’s ultimately about the president of the United States, his policies and whether he tells the truth.”

Hey, you thought, that’s what Jon said.