For those of us who grew up with it, The Daily Show’s deterioration felt like a genuine cultural loss. The issue wasn’t that Stewart had become a prominent progressive voice. It was that he’d become a pundit, another voice screaming into the void. Punditry is my job and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. But in today’s howling mob of a mediascape, there’s nothing daring or rebellious about it either. There aren’t even any barriers to entry: a 10-year-old latchkey kid can finish his snack, log on to Twitter and start calling the president a c**t. It’s the most saturated market on earth, even as we thirst for actual insights. So no surprise, then, that Stewart gave way not just to a successor but to about four million of them. Today, his heirs, who mimic both his approach and his politics, are spread across practically every network on TV. The ‘funnyman as newsreader’ shtick traces back to long before Stewart — Mort Sahl, SNL’s Weekend Update — but today it’s become so pervasive as to feel like newsreel propaganda. Stephen Colbert puts his hands in his pockets and mugs at Donald Trump. John Oliver reads Vox articles off the teleprompter and intersperses them with f-bombs. Samantha Bee is so edgy as to sometimes even call Republicans racists. Jordan Klepper covers hot-button issues, and while he’s never done a segment on mercy killings, his show did recently undergo one.