James Endrst

Special for USA TODAY

Somewhere along the way in the 16-year journey of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, the fake news show started making real news.

It didn’t happen overnight. And as author Chris Smith reveals in The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests (Grand Central, 459 pp., *** out of four stars), it wasn’t always pretty behind the scenes.

But it’s clear who made it happen. It was Jon Stewart who took a basic-cable comedy, half-hour spoof of the news and turned it into a progressive, powerful and highly influential voice in American culture. The show won 23 Emmys during his tenure, was voted one of Time magazine’s 100 best TV shows of all time, and, for many viewers, became a primary news source.

Smith, a contributing editor at New York magazine, weaves an often artful, if occasionally unwieldy, combination of interviews, asides and segues with classic scripted moments from Stewart’s tenure between 1999 and 2015.

The author assembles the famous list of players and cast members (and less famous though no less important writers and producers) including Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, John Oliver, Lewis Black and Larry Wilmore, and let’s them talk. And talk. And talk. About their squabbles — especially between the old guard under original host Craig Kilborn and the new — drugs, hookups and marriages, accusations of sexism, racism, fights, and the time Stewart actually quit.

It’s an insider's look, for sure, with all the protections and discomfort that affords. Friction and strife between Stewart, staffers, the network and guests are all mined and discussed in detail but with a polite patina that suggests even the most candid moments are a bit muted or get a friendly edit.

But The Daily Show (The Book) does deftly recount the way Stewart’s sensibilities, political realities (and unrealities), defining events like 9/11, advances in technology and changes in the television news landscape moved the show from spectator to player. And Stewart from “a struggling standup comic who was one strike away from getting kicked out of show business to the host of one of the smartest and most satirical shows of the era.”

As Smith points out, the greatest contribution of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart from its beginnings in “Indecision 2000” election coverage, to its outright confrontations with everyone from John McCain to Hillary Clinton, was the fact that its “fake news” was “firmly anchored in verifiable reality.”

“What drove Jon was being funny, but also being honest,” says Colbert. “Everything else came from that.” And as talking heads and partisan views increasingly swallowed up 24-hour news channels, precious little was being verified.

“We were never cavalier about the twenty-two minutes of television we had,” says Stewart, who handed off hosting duties to Trevor Noah in September 2015. “We might not have hit it every night. You can’t. But I feel like we brought it every night.”