Jon Stewart as host of “Meet the Press?”

A report on the website of New York magazine said it almost happened before NBC settled on the in-house choice of Chuck Todd to replace the exiting David Gregory.

And nobody at NBC News is denying it. Nor is Mr. Stewart’s longtime agent, James Dixon.

One of the people who would have been involved with any negotiations with Mr. Stewart, the host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” said only that Deborah Turness, the president of NBC News, had consciously sought to establish a reputation as a disrupter, and this move would have shaken the ground under Sunday morning television.

Mr. Stewart has in the past taken pains to deny that his work on “The Daily Show” — which has included often-pointed interviews with newsmakers and satire on par with top-rank political cartoons — has made him a journalist, or anything close to it. He has frequently said that he saw himself as a comedian and nothing more.

Mr. Stewart is branching out, however, with the upcoming film he directed, “Rosewater,” about an Iranian journalist detained by that country’s government (after he appeared on “The Daily Show”).