It was supposed to be an easy Friday edition of CNN’s “Crossfire.”

As a break in the heart of the election season, hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala allotted the vast majority of the show to Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s Emmy-winning fake-news program, “The Daily Show.”

The two pundits were to spend a half-hour tossing softball questions to Stewart concerning his distinctive place in media culture and give him an opportunity to plug his new book. He would be good for some chuckles, maybe a quick discussion or two, and then it was off to the Old Ebbett Grill for the weekend.

Instead of taking his base, however, Stewart throttled the show, its hosts and the mainstream media as a whole, citing failures of “journalists” such as Carlson and Begala in fostering honest debate and discussion with the politicians that paint the agenda. He refused to play ball with the hosts, rejecting their pleas for him to be funny and tactfully dodged requests to halt his reprimanding.

It was a rare shot of seriousness from Stewart, whose acerbic, smart-mouthed demeanor on “The Daily Show” had only hinted at such serious criticism.

“Right now, you’re helping the politicians and the corporations, and we’re left out there to mow our lawns,” Stewart said. “The thing is, we need your help…what you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.”

Carlson, the bow-tied, right-wing twit of “Crossfire,” was particularly taken aback by Stewart’s sermonizing and began sparring verbally with the comedian. Carlson made multiple mentions of Stewart’s inability to ask substantive questions to presidential candidate John Kerry when the Massachusetts senator visited “The Daily Show” and mocked what he saw as a poor, misinformed lecture from Stewart.

“You need to get a job at a journalism school, I think,” Carlson said.

“You need to go to one,” Stewart replied.

While a discussion of Stewart’s distinctive status in news media would have been of great relevance if he had given the hosts chance to pursue it, his choice to berate “Crossfire” is a definitive statement of where he stands in our popular-political culture.

As a comedian, Stewart has been hosting “The Daily Show” since January 1999. After inheriting the show from Craig Kilborn, Stewart went full throttle into the 2000 presidential election, shifting the show into something much more political, and — it can be argued — more civically minded than its previous incarnations.

Since the 2000 election, Stewart has become a name to rely on (yes, rely on) for evenhanded satire of the news and the awkward failings of how it is covered. With his wickedly smart humor, Stewart has drawn in the viewers and — much like “Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update” — young people have come to rely on Stewart for the news.

Such has given the host the rare power that was once reserved solely for newscasters like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. People now depend on Stewart like the old network newscasters. For at least this generation, he’s fulfilling a role that has been vacant since the proliferation of 24-hour network news channels in the last decade.

In this role, Stewart has also become somewhat of a watchdog for the public. Though he doesn’t directly call out and berate the sources of the problems he did on “Crossfire,” he does at least point them out on his show. And if the pointing is too much of an assumption on his part, and even if it’s not, oftentimes these conjectures are cleverly woven into jokes that deter the seriousness of the issue and Stewart’s claims. He has the rare opportunity to skirt the line between seriousness and humor, giving him a uniquely individual status in the field of, dare I say it, journalism.

Certainly not everything Stewart says should be taken at face value, but what he did on “Crossfire” confirmed the beliefs of many that Stewart has an insight many within the industry lack. With his detachment from the formulaic world of news media, Stewart has that ability to step back and make insightful observations when he feels it’s appropriate.

If Friday’s appearance on “Crossfire” is any indication, it certainly means something when he chooses to make those observations public. We undoubtedly need more Voltaires in this world than Tucker Carlsons.

Drew Hansen ([email protected]) has a strong aversion to bowties.