Jon Stewart thinks the news media may have learned all the wrong lessons from COVID-era coverage. During Monday night’s episode of The Daily Show, Stewart tore into the cable-news frenzy surrounding the recent hantavirus outbreak, mocking what he portrayed as an over-the-top attempt to turn it into the next national panic.
Stewart contrasted the current situation with COVID-19, which he noted was an entirely new respiratory virus that spread easily and often asymptomatically. The late-night host reminded the audience how easily COVID passed from person to person, as well as how the lack of research around it contributed to the spread.
By comparison, Stewart pointed out that hantavirus is both well understood and far more difficult to spread between humans. “While the hantavirus is a known virus, it's difficult to transmit,” he explained. “It's mostly spread by rat infestation.”
Of course, that opened the floodgates for Stewart to mock cruises and the passengers. But besides the jokes, Stewart's biggest point was about media coverage.
Throughout the segment, Stewart repeatedly returned to what he saw as a disconnect between scientific experts and television news coverage. According to Stewart, medical experts had already spent days explaining that the outbreak posed a relatively low public health risk, but cable networks kept pushing doomsday speculation anyway.
The Daily Show reeled off a clips package of medical experts downplaying the severity of hantavirus and expressing very little concern when it came to public health and safety. “Their words went a long way to easing the concerns of a curious public,” Stewart continued before delivering the punchline: “And Lord knows the news can't let that happen.”
Stewart argued that by the time networks were still asking whether the outbreak could become “the next pandemic,” the question had effectively already been answered. For the comedian, it seemed almost as if the media felt disappointed that another COVID-level event wasn't on the horizion.
By the end of the segment, Stewart suggested the media’s fixation on frightening worst-case scenarios was less about public safety and more about nostalgia for the enormous audiences cable news attracted during lockdown-era coverage. He went on to accuse cable news networks of trying to "recapture that pandemic ratings magic."
The last thing Stewart, or any late-night TV host, wants to cover right now is another pandemic. The Daily Show host famously made headlines for his COVID-19 thoughts, but that doesn't mean he wants to dive headfirst back into another global health crisis.
There are still plenty of other large-scale issues to cover, whether in traditional news media or the original fake news at The Daily Show. And at least one side is actually doing its part not to create a mass panic out of nothing. Jon Stewart just didn't expect that he'd be the one on television trying to keep things sane.
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