Me & Jon

The truth: I’m bored with telling the story of how I ended up on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Still, it’s the kind of once-in-a-lifetime event that requires a full retelling, but I’ll understand if it’s not your thing. While the end result was a mixed bag, when I’m lying on my death bed, scrolling through climactic scenes from the story of my life, it’ll probably be the only appropriate one for my great-great-great-great-grandchildren.

Think back to August. Specifically think about what was happening in the little town of Ferguson, Missouri. Things were blowing up there, and people were rioting because police had shot and killed an unarmed black kid, Michael Brown. This newspaper was right in the middle of our series, Fatal Encounters, which, since February, had been looking at the national issue of deadly police violence. Our series was established upon an online project I’d conceived back in 2012, to create a database to track incidents of deadly police violence. Add to that an Aug. 22 story I wrote for Gawker, one of the world’s largest blogs, titled “What I’ve Learned from Two Years Collecting Data on Police Killings.”

I’d clearly developed some national credibility on the topic, and I had been included in stories across the lefty news media spectrum, from CNN to NPR to Truthout. Even the far-right blogs picked up the story. It was nuts. I was doing three or four interviews a day, and for each one, I had to have a quick conversation with reporters about the things I did and did not know. For one, I knew little about police violence—next to nothing. I basically know what I’ve learned doing this series. Second, I don’t know what the real statistics are. Nobody does. The FBI releases statistics that have no grounding in truth; only 750 out of 17,985 state and local law enforcement agencies even contribute to those. Sometimes my little disclosures of ignorance would be enough to derail the interview when the reporter or producer discovered the limits to my expertise.

Still, I was pretty impressed with myself. Maybe not in the way most people would imagine, but it sure seemed like this boy from Falls City, Nebraska, had come a long way.

And then on Aug. 28 came an email with the subject line: Hello from The Daily Show.

I’m a senior producer with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and I’m working on a story about the difficulty with finding accurate, objective statistics on fatal police shootings in this country. I’ve read about your work and I was hoping to see if you had some time to talk about some of the challenges you’ve faced with your Fatal Encounters project. Feel free to call me at your earliest convenience.

Best,

Miles Kahn

Senior Producer,

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Blown away, I completely missed the “feel free to call me,” and I fired off an email reply that I was available at his convenience. Wouldn’t it have been funny if I’d missed the whole thing because I was blinded by excitement?

I was going to meet Jon Stewart!

The thrill began to wear off as days of discussion became weeks. I had a couple of telephone conversations with Kahn and a few email exchanges over the next two weeks but by Sept. 12, I had my itinerary in hand. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was flying me out to New York. I was going to stay in the Hudson Hotel on West 58th Street. Limousines were at my beck and call.

I imagined myself striding across that giant, shiny black stage, wearing my best business suit, reflective black shoes and my non-reflective electric yellow pin emblazoned with the QR code to the FatalEncounters.org website. I’d be wry, cool and collected. My face was partially recovered from the bout of Bell’s Palsey, which had paralyzed it just in time for the on-camera CNN interview. This was going to be great. I was going to be a star.

A Big, Rotten Apple

Having left Reno at 10 a.m., I arrived at the John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 8 p.m. Ben’s Limo was there to pick me up. The Haitian driver installed me in the back seat with my bag and said, “I’m going to listen to the news now. We’ll talk later.” It was fine by me. I was taking in the sights, having never been to New York before. Lots of tall buildings, and since it’s a seaboard city, it’s very humid. To me, that moisture just meant I was sweating like an ironworker, and everything stank. I was like a dog with his head stuck out the window. That the city smells like Fulton Alley behind The Nugget downtown was hardly relevant.

It didn’t matter, though, because I was not going to see much of the city. I was on a plane back to Nevada in 35 hours with two sleeps in between.

I checked in and deposited my bags in my tiny but elegant room, and headed to the bar. I truly was at the end of my wire, not just because of all the airplane hours, but because I’d only gotten a couple hours of sleep a night since the Gawker story was published. A few—quite a few—whiskey negronis, and I was asleep.

By that point, I’d been told that I’d be on a segment that would establish that there are no reliable statistics about officer-involved homicides—not the main interview. My biggest fear became that they’d play me for a fool. It’s The Daily Show, for Christ’s sake. It’s their job to make comedy out of the news, and almost every episode that I’d ever seen basically had a good guy who came off looking intelligent and heroic and another guy who came off looking really ignorant or even … crazy. Usually, the ignoramus represented the government in some way.

I had begun a project that none of the national media, no national university, not even the federal government had done—started a national database of people killed by police. One guy with a face like a Dick Tracy villain taking on 1.2 million law enforcement officers, all major media outlets, and the entire Department of Justice. By many people’s standards, I was totally crazy. Made a fool on one of the biggest shows on cable? Sign me up. Oh look, a drone!

So, despite my having assurances from Miles that I wouldn’t have to talk about anything I didn’t know about, I got up the next morning and started having some fun with math from the website. At that time, FatalEncounters.org had complete data on six states—New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine (we’ve since added New York)—so I sat down and calculated the ratio of officer-involved homicides to each state’s total homicides from 2000-2012. I was not going to go to a national interview without some specific numbers.

My interview was scheduled for 2 p.m. at The Daily Show’s 604 West 52nd St. offices. Even though it had been pissing rain on and off all morning, I decided to walk over. It was only about eight blocks away, but because it was New York, on a hot day after a rain, I was soaked in perspiration within three blocks.

The office was a painted brick building, sort of an ugly taupe, with a ragged green awning. It looked like the back of a warehouse. There were bars on the ground-floor window that wasn’t bricked over. I think there were loading-dock styled doors, too. There was no signage, just a buzzer to ring to get past the metal security door. I’ve visited drug dealers who work in friendlier looking places. It was positively run down next to the welding supply store next door.

I buzzed my way in, up a short flight of steps to a security station where the bored guard in the fishbowl, who was probably a titch friendlier than your average storage facility security guy, gave me a lavendar wristband displaying the words, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

I don’t entirely trust my memory. I was shaking in my way-too-casual for NYC boat shoes. Jon Benson—I’m not sure of his title, but he was the guy who answered any stupid questions I had about the show—told me to “feel free to dress however you would dress normally for a work meeting. Something between sweats and a tux would work. I don’t anticipate you were planning on wearing either of those things, but if you were you should reconsider.” He plainly didn’t know how the editor for an alt-weekly in Reno, Nevada, dresses, but I have worn shorts and slippers to work. Anyway, I’d decided to wear khaki slacks and a blue hipster shirt from Hapgood’s and the boat shoes I’ve been wearing with slacks for going on 20 years.

But let me put this in context for you: I was about to have an interview that would be seen by 3 million people. My face was still half-paralyzed. I was 20 pounds overweight from the Prednisone they gave me for the Bell’s Palsy. I was soaked with sweat, and slightly hung over—and I was panic-stricken. It was as though the subway train I could hear barreling down the tunnel had just rounded the curve into sight.

A moment later, Miles Kahn, the producer, was shaking my hand. He seemed a genuinely nice guy, warm. He wore a short-sleeved, button down shirt outside his jeans, had a groomed beard and reddish-blond hair. In short, he looked like most of my friends. He led me to what seemed to be a break room, and left me there with a release that looked like a copy of a copy copied a million times over. Somebody was warming their lunch in a microwave and ignoring me. I signed the release, too distracted to comprehend its words. For all I know, I’m violating its terms now. Don’t worry, I’ll cease and desist any minute now.

Guantanamo studio

When Kahn returned, he took me past what looked sort of like a newsroom with cubicles, to a corner studio. It was small and sweltering. One wall looked like an office library with unfinished wooden shelves and random books and magazines, another was mostly a window into the “newsroom” area. The one that would end up behind me, the set, looked like a den. There were lights and cameras and reflectors. Wires snaked over almost every inch of the floor. There was a loud air conditioner duct overhead and occasional announcements would blast over the PA system. Kahn introduced me to the sound guy, who miked me up. I started my recorder and set it on my briefcase. While the sound guy and I were making small talk, Samantha Bee walked in and introduced herself.

It was surreal. For a second, I doubted my own perception of reality. I don’t know if I can explain it in a meaningful way, but in person she looked sort of like, but almost completely unlike, how she looks on TV. A clone or a body-double somehow. My skeptical senses were twisted so tightly that I wondered if they weren’t playing a joke on me.

I was irritated, hot and muggy, distracted by extraneous sound and lights and sweat trickling down my head and sides. It was exactly the way I’d conduct an interview if I wanted someone to feel anxious or bewildered. The only thing I would have added was a photographer shooting photos with flash, and that, of course, isn’t available for a video interview.

“I’m fucked.” I glanced around for the water board.

There it was. This was beyond stage fright; it felt as though I was being set up. Everyone was nice to me, but I’ve conducted thousands of interviews over the years, and if this wasn’t designed to make me feel uncomfortable, then it showed monumental incompetence.

“Sam” and I chatted on flimsy plastic chairs for a few minutes while people did things around us, throwing me questions and directions: “You going to sit like that? You can lean forward or sit back, but don’t do both.”

Bee had three or four pages of notes. I don’t imagine she did the research, but she was better prepared than anyone I’d spoken to with the exception of the guy from the Washington Post. I suppose it must have been Kahn who made the notes, and as she asked the questions, he’d sometimes chime in from his place next to the camera, making me clarify my answers, or suggesting better phrasing. I don’t know this for certain, but I felt as though he must be watching some kind of speech-to-text screen because he’d always know my exact phrasing of things. Bee, though, was not passive, and she’d follow up with questions based on what I said.

The interview lasted an hour and 49 minutes. The last 10 of it or so was her telling punchlines that I was supposed to react to, and Kahn had sentences he wanted me to repeat without the “ums” and the “you knows.”

Samantha: “OK, well, you’re a data guy, what is the statistical likelihood of me sitting down and interviewing three different people who look exactly like Hank from Breaking Bad?”

Sometimes Bee or Kahn wouldn’t like the way the punchline came out so she’d repeat it.

Miles: So even you don’t know.

Samantha: Oh God. So even you don’t know? Oh my God! So even you don’t know?

Miles: Jesus, why am I even here.

Samantha: Oh my God. Why am I even here? Why am I even here? Why am I even here?

Miles: Really North Dakota? All right, I’m going to do North Dakota, but it only gets one.

Samantha: OK, OK. Who’s next? Who’s next? North Dakota, let me take a guess: one. Next. … Maine and Vermont? Who’s next, North Dakota? Let me take a guess. One. OK move on, let’s go New York and California. …

And like that, it was finished. A quick photo, and Bee went to the back of the building. They had me walk for the camera and pull up the Fatal Encounters website and pretend to type for B-roll. Then Kahn and a young woman escorted me back to the swag closet, grabbed me a couple of Daily Show T-shirts and a hat and pointed me toward the door.

I felt as though something had changed during the interview, like maybe I’d somehow disappointed Kahn, or the interview had gone poorly in some way I didn’t understand. When they were finished with me, they were just done.

You know what it felt like? It felt like the morning after a one-night stand: “Get you a cab? What for? The bus stop is right over there.”

As I slunk out, I realized Jon Stewart, who must record with the live audience at about 4 p.m., was playing on the televisions that ringed the bullpen while his coworkers laughed. Despite the fact I’d traveled 2,688 miles, I was exactly as close to Jon Stewart as I was before I left.

The weeks dragged on after my return, and in the meantime a Bloomberg story came out—“Don’t ever appear on The Daily Show.” Imprecise show dates followed by silence. Finally on Oct. 7 came the message from Kahn: “We’re on tonight. Hope you enjoy!”

My guts twisted that night when I realized Jon Stewart had called in sick; I wasn’t even going to be on the same show with him. Jason Jones was hosting, and when his wife, Bee, came on to introduce the segment, “A Shot in the Dark,” the patter dragged on and on. Joy vomit? … Criminologist David Klinger, good. We’d been in the same stories before. … Former New York Police Department Chief Bernie Kerik, good. There’s the guy who gets portrayed as the goat. … Nate Silver, fantastic! …. Four and a half minutes in, just after the tarot card reader, there I was! Twenty-three words over 45 seconds, and they showed the website to millions of people. I didn’t look like an idiot!

They flew me out to New York and tortured me for two hours for that?

It was awesome!