The Annenberg survey found that people who watch The Daily Show are more interested in the presidential campaign, more educated, younger, and more liberal than the average American or than Leno or Letterman viewers. “However, these factors do not explain the difference in levels of campaign knowledge between people who watch The Daily Show and people who do not,” Young pointed out. “In fact, Daily Show viewers have higher campaign knowledge than national news viewers and newspaper readers — even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age, and gender are taken into consideration.”
Link.
Strangely, folks who don’t watch any of the late-night comedy shows (Stewart, Leno, etc) do worse than the comedy watchers. I watch BBC at that time slot. Go figure.
Did you read that Bill O’Reilly called Jon Stewart’s viewers “stoned slackers” when Stewart was a guest on his show recently? They were both joking around, but it made the news. Stewart got a nice dig in himself, and O’Reilly is going to be a guest on The Daily Show soon. That’s bound to be amusing. “You know what’s really frightening?” O’Reilly said to Stewart. “You actually have an influence on this presidential election. That is scary, but it’s true. You’ve got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night, and they can vote.”
Another study found that Daily Show viewers are more likely to have completed four years of college than are O’Reilly’s viewers. They also answered political news questions correctly more often than O’Reilly viewers. So, us Daily Show “stoned slackers” are both smarter and funnier … and we can vote. ;)
The reason is obvious: You need to be aware of current events to undestand politically oriented comedy.
Having seen *Outfoxed* last month, I’m firmly convinced that Cat Stevens is considerably less of a threat in the air than is Bill O’Reilly. [shudder]