Comedian's appeal lay in his global vision

NAIROBI: Jon Stewart's departure from the comedy hit, The Daily Show, may be bad news for his employer – Comedy Central - but it could be worse for his legion of global fans.

Comedy Central's Michele Ganeless spoke for millions when he said: "His comedic brilliance is second to none."

BBC's man in New York, Nick Bryant, was even more generous: "Like the evening news shows of yore, The Daily Show has become appointment viewing, though many people catch it afterwards online, where Stewart's riffs often become viral sensations and also enjoy a long afterlife.

Part of his appeal has come from launching stinging critiques about the sensationalist tendencies of modern-day American TV news, with the cable networks Fox News and CNN among his favourite targets. A much-quoted online poll once showed that 44 per cent of respondents looked upon him as the best source for trustworthy news."

"In that same poll Brian Williams scored 29 per cent - a trustworthiness ranking that the suspended NBC News anchor would probably be happy with today. It's a fluke of timing that Stewart has announced his departure on the same night that Williams has been reprimanded by NBC News.

But it underscores how late-night comedians have in some ways usurped prime-time anchors, especially for the online generation. Stewart's show has often been cited as a leading news source for young people, with an average audience of one million viewers," he concluded.

Apart from the European Champion' League, I cannot recall a television show that could keep some of us awake in my undergraduate days more than The Daily Show.

Without cable television at one point later in the United States, I was extremely pleased to find that Stewart's show could stream live, and for free, on an online platform whose access was limited to viewers in the US.

Its appeal to me lay in its attempt to be the everyday man of television, and regularly wrestling with the international issues that most American networks were avoiding like a plague.

Where the major networks brought you international news following the occasional disaster some place, Stewart would be bringing out the mundane and profound in a global conference on some issue.

Thus, in addition to the regular staple of domestic issues, viewers would be invited to consider America's place and role in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world.

This, in retrospect, must be his singular contribution to his fans beyond America, for he continued to lay the bricks for public diplomacy, a need made dire by the continued neglect of international news on most domestic networks.

Closer home, you are more likely to get snippets of international news at lunch hour, but none during the more popular evening bulletins.

Talk radio, on the other hand, will more likely report international news if some celebrity is caught pants down, makes a scene or adopts some wild animal.

In a sense, consumers of media are increasingly being left to their own devices when it comes to international news, which these days mean either the BBC or the foreign pages of local dailies. Understandably, this has been fueled by the notion that most Kenyans are looking for local news, and will only reach out for European leagues, Nigerian movies and some soap operas. We are now in the strange place of increased regional integration, coupled with limited understanding of the nuances that inform issues and events in some of our neighbouring nations.

Where local comedy shows could have provided leadership, we have been left to amuse ourselves on stale ethnic, sexist and religious stereotypes; re-arranged prejudice is fast passing for analysis, even as advertisers cash in.

Thus, for instance, Kenyans and Tanzanians are literally butchering each other online over unresolved issues in the tourism sector, but no comedian is drawing parallels with the seamless wildebeest migration across both nations each year, which makes a mockery of the nationalist tensions we maintain towards each other.

This moment of wider learning will remain lost if audiences continue to settle for the current menu, and producers think it is more expensive – and harder work – to pull a local Stewart.