This is priceless:
“No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign,” was compiled by Julia R. Fox, an assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, and two graduate students who compared broadcast nightly newscasts on July 26-30, Aug. 30-31 and Sept. 1-3 in 2004 to episodes of The Daily Show from the same period. The study will be published next summer by the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media.
…Although, “a second-by-second analysis of The Daily Show’s audio and visual content found considerably more humor than substance,” the study also “found considerably more hype than substance in broadcast newscasts.” Fox characterized “references to polls, political endorsements and photo opportunities” as examples of such “hype.”
…Fox said of The Daily Show, “We’ve been wringing our hands for decades that the networks aren’t doing enough substance in the political coverage, so is it any real surprise that it’s just as substantive?”
“Our findings should allay at least some of the concerns about the growing reliance on this non-traditional source of political information, as it is just as substantive as the source that Americans have relied upon for decades,” Fox said.
All in all, Fox concludes that “we should probably be concerned about both of those sources, because neither one is particularly substantive.”
“It’s a bottom-line industry and ratings-driven,” said Fox. “We live in an ‘infotainment’ society, and there certainly are a number of other sources available.”
