Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” told NPR’s Terry Gross in a “conversation” at New York’s 92nd St. Y that “The Daily Show” isn’t journalism.
“We don’t do anything but make the connections,” he said in the Sept. 29 talk. “We’re just going off our own instinct of, ‘What are the connections to this that make sense?’ And this really is true: We don’t fact-check [and] look at context because of any journalistic criteria that has to be met; we do that because jokes don’t work when they’re lies. We fact-check so when we tell a joke, it hits you at sort of a gut level — not because we have a journalistic integrity, [but because] hopefully we have a comedic integrity that we don’t want to violate.”
Later on in the night, Stewart commented on Fox News host Glenn Beck. “He’s a reaction to what he feels like is the news, and so are we. We actually share quite a bit in common in terms of, not point of view necessarily, but reason for being. We’re both in some ways an op-ed. We consider ourselves editorial cartoonists in some respect. Not him, but the show,” Stewart said.
See more of Stewart’s talk here.