Letters: Stewart: Good job or good riddance?

COMEDIAN Jon Stewart, longtime host of Comedy Central's "Daily Show," announced last week that he would be "retiring" from the program before the end of the year. National news outlets from coast to coast reported the announcement as breaking news, and the New York Times dubbed Stewart "the nation's satirist in chief."

Stewart has hosted the daily satirical "fake news" show for 16 years, though the program has often been credited with - or accused of - serving up real news to a mostly young audience. A 2006 Indiana University study, for example, found little difference in substance between "The Daily Show" and other nightly news broadcasts.

Was Jon Stewart the satirist America needed? Or did he make the real news and public discourse only worse? Joel Mathis and Ben Boychuk, the RedBlueAmerica columnists, weigh in.

JOEL MATHIS: Once upon a time, the main thing that Jon Stewart represented in our mediasphere was hope.

If you're not a liberal, or you're under 25, you might not remember the time the way that liberals do. But there was a time - almost exactly a decade ago - when many of us were certain the country had gone absolutely insane.

America had invaded Iraq on the pretext that we were preventing Saddam Hussein's development of weapons of mass destruction - only to find no weapons and no real program to speak of. We'd learned that the Bush administration had authorized warrantless wiretapping; we'd learned that America had tortured prisoners of war. Despite all that - all the seeming departures from our country's longstanding values and rule of law - George W. Bush got re-elected. Re-elected!

Those of us who were liberal were dumbfounded. Were we strangers to our own country?

We talked to each other through a new medium: blogs. We exposed what we saw as the lies and mendacity of the Bush administration, and struggled to understand why our neighbors couldn't see them, too. Those conversations helped us realize that we weren't alone, but they were rarely positive. Mostly they were angry and then angrier. And for good reason.

Jon Stewart offered the anger and disbelief - he reinforced them with his nightly montages of videotape, forever catching the Establishment (both government and media) in convenient hypocrisies, assuring us that we weren't crazy. But he also did something else valuable. He made us laugh.

Stewart always tried to say he was a comedian first and foremost, that he was only incidentally a cultural critic. That wasn't quite true, of course, but it was true enough. By giving disaffected liberals something to laugh at - instead of forever rage against - he opened the door to the possibility of hope, of optimism that it wouldn't always be the way it was right then.

It was a gift. Thanks, Jon Stewart. Now here's your moment of Zen.

BEN BOYCHUK: If you wanted your biases confirmed and your opinions served up with a heaping side of snark, then Jon Stewart was your man.

Night after night, the outspokenly liberal Stewart sat behind his desk, surrounded by his adoring liberal fans, and lobbed his brickbats at every soft political target imaginable: maladroit Republicans, over-the-top Fox News hosts, Mitt Romney. Talk about speaking truth to power!

Funny thing, though: Here is a man who made "civility" a mantra. Here was a man who famously appeared on CNN's "Crossfire," in 2004, to rail against the scourge of cable news and the degeneration of public discourse. Here was a man who once told an interviewer, "There's no real edge in gratuitous slamming of people."

Uh-huh.

Yet, few comedians have captured the imaginations and shaped the opinions of young liberals as Stewart has. Maybe that same could have been said of George Carlin 40 years ago, though Carlin was anti-establishment through and through.

Stewart, on the other hand, has interviewed presidents and ex-presidents, U.S. senators and congressmen and diplomats. He hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011. He isn't just the nation's "satirist in chief" - he's the court jester. He may mock the king now and again, but he is still the establishment's licensed fool.

So, although it's a bit depressing, it's not at all surprising that the coverage of Stewart's pending retirement from a program viewed by 2.5 million people on a good night is being treated like Walter Cronkite's departure from CBS News 34 years ago.

Cronkite was for many TV viewers "the most trusted man in America." Not that Cronkite was particularly objective; he just had excellent PR.

Cronkite has nothing on Stewart. The same day that Stewart announced his exit from "The Daily Show," NBC News said its anchorman Brian Williams would be suspended six months without pay for making up stories. Cue a thousand "fake news" jokes.

But given his strange respect in a country that distrusts the news more than ever, would it be such a stretch for Stewart to fill Williams' shoes?