Study Shows Daily Show Has As Much News As "Real" News Programs

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The Daily Show is much funnier than traditional newscasts, but a new study from Indiana University says it has the same amount of meat on its bones when it comes to coverage of the news. The brand of news coverage Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show's staff brings to the airwaves is just as substantive as traditional news programs like World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News.

Most of us think the Daily Show is a lot more informative than all mainstream news.

The researchers looked at coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions and the first presidential debate of the fall campaign, all of which were covered by the mainstream broadcast news outlets and The Daily Show. Individual broadcasts of the nightly news and corresponding episodes of The Daily Show were analyzed by the researchers, who found that the "average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories" were no different from The Daily Show. Perhaps more telling, The Daily Show delivered longer stories on the topic.

"It should be noted that the broadcast network news stories about the presidential election were significantly shorter, on average, than were The Daily Show with Jon Stewart stories," said Professor Fox. "The argument could be made that while the amount of substance per story was not significantly different, the proportion of each story devoted to substance was greater in the network news stories ... On the other hand, the proportion of stories per half hour program devoted to the election campaign was greater in The Daily Show."

Using the entire half-hour programs as the basis of analysis yielded the same results: there was just as much substance to The Daily Show's coverage as there was on the network news. And The Daily Show was much funnier, with less of the hype—references to photo ops, political endorsements, and polls—that typically overshadows substantive coverage on network news, according to the study.

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Great Picture
Posted by ueberbill on 2006-10-05 09:39:48
Love the pic- he looks 19. Must've been from when he first took over from Kilborn. Although I don't remember him looking THAT young back then.
 

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