News is serious business.
Anyone who paid any attention in Journalism School would know this.
And it was in Journalism School that I discovered Jon Stewart (too late, I know). The professors did their jobs by showing us footage of Cronkite and Murrow, and Cooper and Amanpour and their counterparts here in India.
But for some odd reason I related to Stewart more.
He was simply cleaner, more honest, and by very very far, the funniest. With all due respect and not to seem preachy, journalists need not be much else.
But when you try and toe the line for the sake of propriety and try to catch The Daily Show online from India, you get this -
So that wonder of the world, YouTube, came to the rescue for my dose of Mr. Stewart.
The man eviscerated everything from general stupidity to media bias and politicians. Yes there is indeed a spectrum here, and he tore through it with a lot of anger, because the said spectrum does make people with common sense - angry.
But Jon Stewart’s anger rode subtly behind a subliminal multiple Emmy Award winning, razor sharp wit. And he will be missed.
Tributes have been pouring in for Jon, and it makes one realise just how much the man and ‘The Daily Show’ went on to influence a generation of Americans, and at least the same number across the world (Even if most of it was through YouTube and not-so-legal downloads)
Ellen DeGeneres’ 140 character sum up is by far the most apt tribute to Jon - no one may ever come as close to making us laugh so hard even as he made us think so hard about the world we live in.
Stephen Colbert, a Daily Show alum, went off script towards the end of Jon’s final broadcast and went on to talk about a side of Jon Stewart that people had heard and read a lot less about.
Here’s a set of pictures from Jon Stewart’s final broadcast where the entire Daily Show team and alum came together to bid Stewart a #JonVoyage.
Jon’s set on The Daily Show was donated to Newseum and will be exhibited there. Here’s what they tweeted.
For some reason, while reading the tributes for Jon, a leading Indian magazine’s cover story came to mind, “The Man Who Killed TV News”
For years, in India, and elsewhere we’ve witnessed yelling bouts in the name of “Primetime News”. When it got too much, some of us found an escape route in Stewart.
He was the anti-thesis of “The Man Who Killed TV News”. For me he brought TV News alive. Pity I only got to watch him on YouTube.
From some of us who wish that our hair goes from black to grey doing the news - Thank you Jon! Wish I could have been part of that group hug.
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