We here at the Media Research Center have been counting the guests that appear on the late night comedy programs since September 2022, and The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart is not a fan. On Comedy Central’s The Weekly Show Thursday podcast, Stewart went on an expletive-laden rant against Fox News for citing those studies, so we did the only natural thing we could think of in response: we also counted his podcast guests.
In 48 episodes since The Weekly Show began on June 6, 2024, up through July 31, 2025, Stewart has had 68 total guests, 61 or 90 percent of whom have been liberals. This list of liberals includes The Bulwark’s Mona Charen, who at one point in time was a reliable conservative but whose appearance was devoted to pre-election Kamala Harris promotionalism.
As with our late night TV studies, these guests do not include foreign politicians because placing foreigners on the American political spectrum is not always easy, but it should be noted that Stewart interviewed left-wing London Mayor Sadiq Khan on September 26 and former U.K. Conservative minister-turned-independent Rory Stewart on April 24.
Stewart’s non-liberal guests included six conservatives and one libertarian, former Reason editor-in-chief, Nick Gillespie. One of those conservatives was former Ohio official Matt Masterson, who was on to talk about election security at the same time as Stacey Abrams, not anything related to conservative policy, but because we counted Frank Fahrenkopf Jr. as Republican, even though the sole reason for his appearance on The Daily Show was to defend the Commission on Presidential Debates, so we included Masterson as well.
When it came to current and former elected officials, Stewart has interviewed eight Democrats (Amy Klobuchar, Stacey Abrams, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hakeem Jeffries, Pete Buttigieg, Andy Beshear, and Tom Suozzi) and two Republicans (Chris Christie and Brian Fitzpatrick). Suozzi and Fitzpatrick appeared together to discuss the Problem Solvers Caucus and the possibility of bipartisanship in the current political climate.
Stewart’s 90 percent liberal podcast guest count is quite high, but it says something about the state of the late night shows that if The Weekly Show were on TV, it would be the most balanced of the five shows currently on the air. From September 2022-June 2025, The Daily Show has had 157 liberal guests compared to 9 conservatives, or 95 percent liberal guests. That ties it with NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon for the least bad of all late night programs.
