Brian Williams Confirms: Jon Stewart is 'Indispensable'

When does a fake news show turns into an "indispensable" news source? Perhaps when Brian Williams tells us it's so. And these days the NBC Nightly News anchor is practically shouting praise for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from the rooftops, and pouring on the accolades for the show's host in both a Newsweek essay and an NPR interview.

"A lot of the work that Jon and his staff do is serious," Williams told NPR's Guy Raz. "They hold people to account, for errors and sloppiness. ... It's usually delivered with a smile — sometimes not. It's not who we do it for, it's not our only check and balance, but it's healthy — and it helps us that he's out there."

Pick any Daily Show episode at random and you're likely to come across a thought-provoking, painfully funny — and true — piece skewering politicians and newsmakers alike. My recent favorite included a clip of him calling out Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson for purposefully dumbing herself down for her audience and claiming she needed to google words such as "ignoramus" and "czar," even though she graduated Stanford and is a classically-trained violinist.

Williams argues that Stewart's show is like the fourth estate for the fourth estate, and helps keep journalists like him on their toes, especially when his team indulges in "what I call Margaret Mead journalism — where we 'discover Twitter,'... I will, and have, said that, 'You know, maybe we can just give a heads-up to Jon to set aside some time for that tonight.'"

The NBC anchor is not a wholesale Stewart cheerleader — he does call him out for what he called "an attack interview" with Jim Cramer of CNBC — but the very first sentence of his Newsweek essay about Stewart seems to sum up his feelings toward the anchor.

"In just a few short years, Jon Stewart has gone from optional to indispensable," Williams wrote in a piece describing why Stewart earned the #2 spot on the newsweekly's list of "New Thought Leaders" of the past decade.

We sure are glad Stewart is on the scene to hold the mainstream media more accountable — and make us laugh a lot, too.

Photo courtesy of Martin Monroe via Wikimedia Commons