Storytime, I guess.
I feel like back in the time before the Bush presidency the Daily Show didn't have a meaningful editorial voice. Sure, the news could be made fun of, but there was no particularly great angle to the jokes beyond 'ha-ha look at this shit'. Sort of like the Florida Man stuff you see today, here's something fucked up that happened. This was, after all, the Comedy Central that was giving us South Park at just about the same time.
It wasn't really until the Iraq War hit and the media's attempt to build a justification for it that the show really found a coherent voice, mission, and audience. "Hey, did you watch the Daily Show last night?" suddenly became a catchphrase and the sort of water cooler discussion that you might hear. Bush was, yes, a controversial figure worthy of disrespect from most, and that and the transparent lies from the news taking a front-and-center position made it a major contributor to the US's national discourse. We get Al Franken tearing into the GOP news machine with Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them, and John Stewart not too long later (2005) going onto a CNN program and managing to own them so hard they cancel the show for nearly a decade.
Then Obama becomes president. And now we wind up in a different circumstance. Bush and the general news media are easy to rip into because they're conservative enough that TDS is left enough that they can make cogent criticism that feeds into the start of a new youth-driven leftist movement that's starting to make itself seen and heard everywhere from Wall Street to the local ballot boxes. Now, the politics of the man in charge and the one show that actually held him check are aligned. The rest of the media doesn't give a shit as long as they retain access to power, except for the ones using the unprecedented state of a black man at the head of the federal government to rile up a new revanchist movement that wanted to keep him in check. Those of you familiar with some of WEB DuBois's letters and articles in the time of reconstruction may recognize this was the same sort of mocking and sandbagging that newly elected Black representatives faced in that era. Finding themselves politically aligned, TDS as a show was now rising to defend Obama; they were not prepared nor interested in criticizing him from the left in general. They were not always pulling punches, but the show was of a very different tenor to the Bush years. One of the more notable public stunts was Stewart now hosting "The Rally to Restore Sanity", a day's live program that may as well have existed to throw a smokescreen over the purpose and validity of politicized anger.
And the problem is, of course, that Obama isn't inherently above criticism as a leader either. [Charles Pierce voice] If Anwar and Abduhlraman al-Alwaki were still alive, they'd probably agree that wearing a tan suit was Obama's biggest political misstep as president.
So during the Obama era, new leftist media outlets needed to rise in order to deliver meaningful criticism of the Obama era. And perhaps unsurprisingly, they have done so in the ways that worked about a decade ago -- comedy programs whose voice is derived from a certain, ah, bro culture. Your TYTs and your Chapos, and....yes, your fucking Cum Towns. God. They are obviously not all universally loved on the left (any more than your nightly news-comedy-commentary programs were back in the day) and as the leftist movements in this country grow stronger I think we'll see them become outmoded for similar reasons TDS is now -- their editorial voices put them in line with Sanders, who might well become our next president. There is still plenty of room to criticize Sanders and the movement around him from the left (believe it or not, some far leftists take issue with the idea that elections are even a part of success at all -- if Sanders wins, that motivated revanchist group I mentioned earlier might well take their talk of war to the next level; if Sanders loses, the left may need to take drastic action just to keep the very planet alive).
My support for TYT is pretty abstract; Cenk and Dore, for example, were never stewards of my viewpoints. Their most important work has been as part of feeding into a larger leftist counter-media group and finding new voices to highlight and share. I think in time the media outlet will go a similar way to TDS and still exist but not attract this level of attention, which I think it does mainly because leftist media discoverability is still pretty difficult (but getting better).