Jon Stewart was born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz on November 28, 1962, in New York City, to Marian (nee Laskin), a teacher and later educational consultant, and Donald Leibowitz, a professor of physics at The College of New Jersey and Thomas Edison State College. Stewart's family are Litvak Jews who emigrated to America from Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. One of his grandfathers was born in Manzhouli (now part of Inner Mongolia). He is the second of four sons, with older brother Lawrence and younger brothers Dan and Matthew.

Throughout his tenure on The Daily Show, Stewart has frequently accused Fox News of distorting the news to fit a conservative agenda, at one point ridiculing the network as "the meanest sorority in the world." In November 2009, Stewart called out Fox News for using some footage from a previous Tea Party rally during a report on a more recent rally, making the latter event appear more highly attended than it actually was. The show's anchor, Sean Hannity, apologized for the footage use the following night. A month later, Stewart criticized Fox & Friends cohost Gretchen Carlson - a former Miss America and a Stanford graduate - for claiming that she googled words such as "ignoramus" and "czar". Stewart said that Carlson was dumbing herself down for "an audience who sees intellect as an elitist flaw".  Stewart stepped up his criticism of Fox News in 2010; as of April 24, The Daily Show had 24 segments criticizing Fox News' coverage. Bill O'Reilly, host of the talk show The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, countered that The Daily Show was a "key component of left-wing television" and that Stewart loved Fox News because the network was "not boring".  During an interview with Chris Wallace on June 19, 2011, Stewart called Wallace "insane" after Wallace said that Stewart's earlier comparison of a Sarah Palin campaign video and an anti-herpes medicine ad was a political comment. Stewart also said Fox viewers are the "most consistently misinformed" viewers of political media. This comment was ranked by fact-checking site PolitiFact as false, with conditions. Stewart later accepted his error.  In 2014, Stewart engaged in an extended "call-out" of Fox News based on their perceived hypocritical coverage of food stamps and U.S. Government assistance. This culminated during the Bundy standoff involving multiple segments, across multiple episodes, specifically singling out Sean Hannity and Hannity's coverage of the event. Hannity would "return fire" by calling out Stewart for associating himself with Cat Stevens during his Rally in 2010. Stewart responded to this by calling out Hannity for frequently calling Ted Nugent a "friend and frequent guest" on his program and supporting Nugent's violent rhetoric towards Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2007. In late August 2014, Stewart vehemently opposed the manner in which Fox News portrayed the events surrounding the shooting of teenager Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri and the subsequent protests from citizens.

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how did he step it up?