Jon Stewart: Funny but Wrong?

Kevin Drum writes about Jon Stewart emceeing at the Peabody awards on Monday. Read the two paragraphs there, they are typical Stewart biting commentary.

But I seem to remember him deriding congressmen for making constant comparisons to Nazis to make political points. Maybe I'm just bothered by something from Monday night's Daily Show. Stewart commented on the new DHS budget that supposedly cuts funds to NY and DC and increases them to smaller cities like Omaha. He showed some clips of Chernoff on News Hour with Jim Lehrer and made him look stupid. I saw the whole original interview and know that he took the comments out of context.

As best I understand it the whole DHS budget issue is flap is unjustified. It goes like this. It's been 5 years since 9/11 and we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars to increase security at vulnerable cities. No I don't think we're done, but I do think that more than NY and DC are at risk. DHS makes good points about power plants, food supply chains, chemical plants and other things being vulnerable to terrorist attacks. In prior years we've given disproportionately to NY and DC and other high risk cities as we should have. But I don't think these funds should now be counted as new revenue streams for the cities. It turns out out last year NY and DC got greatly increased funds through this program, the fact that they got normal funds this year really shouldn't be a cut. Also, NY still got more this year than every other city combined. Oh and DHS followed congresses mandated risk-based budget process.

Stewart and Rob Corddry made a point to skewer DHS for not ranking the Brooklyn Bridge or Empire State Building as National Icons. Lehrer asked Chernoff about that and he said in the rankings, "national icon" was a lower risk than other descriptions like "tall building with people" so that these NY sites got more funding by not being called national icons. Stewart and company obviously knew this since they watched the interview.

I know the Daily Show is a comedy show but they often manage to achieve hilarity while informing us of real things. I suppose I shouldn't be disappointed in their lax journalistic standards, they are not journalists and often say so. But dammit I want them to be, because they are usually more informative than other TV news sources. At least I thought they were, now I'm not so sure.

Does anyone else feel this way? Is their stuff not as funny if it isn't true?