Jon Stewart has a show to do tonight. But first, he had some business at City Hall.
Hours before he’s set to return behind the The Daily Show desk on a rare Tuesday night, Stewart joined New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for a press conference marking the release of long-sought city records concerning air quality and health hazards in Lower Manhattan following the September 11 attacks.
Mamdani announced Tuesday that he was making public more than 170,000 pages of records, including the “Harding Memo,” an October 2001 document addressing the city’s knowledge of air-quality dangers and its potential legal liability.
Stewart, who has spent more than 15 years advocating alongside 9/11 first responders and survivors for health care and compensation, began his remarks by thanking Mamdani and his administration for making the documents public. Then he turned his attention to the previous 25 years.
“I want to be fair to the city,” Stewart said. “If you look at the Harding memo, they didn’t find out, they didn’t recognize, that the air that everyone was breathing in downtown Manhattan was toxic until October of 2001.”
“So to be fair to them,” he continued, “they only buried that information for twenty-five years.”
Stewart credited the first responders, families, advocates, and elected officials gathered behind him with forcing the records into public view.
“The city began covering their ass three weeks in, in a memo,” he said. “The memo is entitled Legislative Alternatives to the Fiscal Responsibility for 9/11. These people had to fight, sick and dying, for years.”
It was familiar territory for Stewart. In December 2010, he devoted an episode of The Daily Show to 9/11 responders as Congress stalled on the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, bringing four responders onto the program to discuss their illnesses and the fight for federal assistance.
Five years later, after leaving The Daily Show, Stewart returned as Trevor Noah’s guest to again press Congress on the issue and joined responders lobbying lawmakers in Washington.
And in 2019, he delivered an emotional appearance before a House Judiciary subcommittee as advocates fought to permanently fund the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. Congress ultimately passed the permanent authorization that summer.
On Tuesday, Stewart said that while having the newly released information sooner might not have changed the medical outcomes for those who later became ill, it would have made it much harder to dismiss what people living and working downtown were experiencing.
“I guarantee you it would not have been the struggle that it was to get people to recognize that what they all knew and what we all knew who live in downtown Manhattan, is that there was poison in the air, and on the ground, and in the windowsills, and in your air conditioners, and covering your pets and your clothes, and it stayed there for months.”
“Everyone knew,” he added. “And now it’s very clear that the city knew as well.”
Stewart returns to his other job tonight when The Daily Show airs at 11 p.m. ET on Comedy Central.
