Now Where Do I Get My News?

Jon Stewart is leaving the Daily Show...  let there be a day of mourning, the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, because one of the few voices of truth is leaving his post!
Actually, no, it's okay, I'm going to miss him, but he has done something rather wonderful over the past 17 years, and I think it's okay for him to go and do something else now.  But Jon has caught lightning in a bottle.  He was the right guy, at the right time, in the right place, to invent something new: fake news that ended up being more honest than the "real" news.
In the beginning, the DS was about deliberately taking statements far out of context, taking absurd pictures or videos and inventing fake stories about them, it was funny, but it wasn't groundbreaking.  At some point, Stewart and his crew realized that they didn't actually have to make things up, the truth was absolutely as worthy of a good laugh as anything they could possibly make up.  They were pretty honest about this surprising reality.  In recent years, Stewart would often just look at the camera and say something like, "We used to have to make stuff up," after some politician, or more often a Fox News pundit said something so outlandishly false or hypocritical that all you really have to do is sort of roll your eyes and it's an instant joke.
Stewart is clever and likable and generally really seems to be puzzled by the ideological blindness of both the left and the right.  In opening our eyes to what is worthy of ridicule about the world, he also opens our eyes to the truth.  I don't think it was ever really an intentional move though.  I think they were just comedians looking for a laugh, and it turned out that there was more ammo out there in the regular old news than they had expected.
What the Daily Show did so very well was what Toto did in the Wizard of Oz.  Because of their sense of smell, they knew there was something fishy about how we were being told about the world.  We were too trusting of news anchors whose primary qualification was good hair, and we listened too guilelessly to pundits who were really trying to sell us something (sometimes the only thing to sell is fear).  The DS pulled back the curtain to show us the sad old man working the media machine.
Stewart's tone, and the tone of the show was always: "Look you guys, you can see how ridiculous this really is right?  You're not stupid, you can think for yourselves.  You know there's something wrong about how they're telling you this story."
In the process of doing this, in assuming that we can actually appreciate the humor in how ridiculous things have gotten, he showed that people could trust him.  I felt like I could trust him, because I knew where he was coming from, what his agenda was: to be funny.  I cannot say the same thing about straight news, any of it.  I feel like I have to parse out Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzer, and I'm not even going to get started on the Fox crowd.  I either don't know what their angle is or I just plain don't like the angle they're taking.
The DS gives us an alternative to the Walter Cronkite, voice of God, presentation of the news.  We need that because the news media has proven to be untrustworthy (not evil, just unreliable) in their quest for the truth.  Jon was not questing for the truth, he was questing for a joke, he found the truth rather accidentally, or some might say organically.
The reason that I think it's all going to be okay, now that the little guy is leaving, is that the form never really relied that much on him.  He was/is not really the cult of personality type.  Nothing about him screams: authority figure, mostly it screams: funny guy.  The form for finding the truth while looking for laugh is out there now, the curtain is pulled back, it's just a matter of finding someone who can sit at the Daily Show desk, and the truth can continue to smirk at us.
It was Stewart's gift to be able to laugh at just about anything, especially himself.  For 17 years he has helped all of us do the same thing, and it has gotten us through some really tough times.
Thank you Jon.