With flashy graphics, an over-excitable anchor and searing political satire, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” has kept audiences laughing for years, but the “fake news” comedy show is not just a joke.
A recent study by Julia R. Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, has found “The Daily Show,” which airs weeknights on Comedy Central, to be just as substantive as network coverage.
The interpretation from the blogosphere and the mainstream media has mostly fallen into two categories of response, Fox said: 1) That the study validates the quality of “The Daily Show” as a legitimate news source, and 2) that the study underscores the dismal state of network newscasts.
“I think the answer is probably two,” she said. “I think what’s gotten people excited is one. My only gripe is that people aren’t doubting the equal substance. If anything, they’re saying (“The Daily Show”) is more substantive.”
Scott Maier, associate professor at the journalism school, said the study speaks loudly about the state of news being broadcast. In the time a viewer might spend watching an entire news broadcast, a newspaper reader might get through a single story, Maier said.
“I think it’s a sad state of television news where network and local news have focused more on sideline issues,” he said, “which is not to say that television does things poorly. It’s great for breaking news.”
Fox’s study “No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign,” which will be published in a scholarly journal next summer, is the first effort to systematically examine how the comedy program compares to traditional television news as sources of political information.
“The Daily Show” has provoked scholarly research in the past: The National Annenberg Election Survey found that “Daily Show viewers (knew) more about election issues than people who regularly read newspapers or watch television news,” and polls of the younger demographics have repeatedly found the show listed among other comedy shows as a top news source.
Stewart’s mock newscast also has flirted with respectability, hosting appearances by major national and international figures and serving as the setting when John Edwards announced his intent to run for president in 2004.
Nevertheless, Fox wondered how the increasingly influential comedy news content on “The Daily Show” stacked up against the traditional network news broadcasts. Her solution was to quantify second-by-second coverage during the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions and presidential debates as “hype,” “humor” and “substance.” Half-hour broadcasts were broken down into separate audio and video channels and analyzed.
“Hype” included references to polls, political endorsements and photo opportunities, while “humor” included laughter, jokes and applause, Fox said.
Because the broadcast network news stories were significantly shorter, on average, than “The Daily Show” stories, the analysis was run again using the half-hour program, rather than the story, as the unit of analysis. The proportion of stories per half-hour program devoted to the election campaign was greater in “The Daily Show,” and Fox found no significant differences in substance.
“The networks were more hype than substance, and ‘The Daily Show’ was more humor than substance, but they were equally substantive,” she said. “It’s certainly no worse than the source people have relied on for decades.”
That said, Fox said she sees her work as less of an endorsement of “The Daily Show” and more of an indictment of network news. Stewart is up-front about his role as a comedian – not as a journalist, Fox said, but she said the networks have previously been considered the gold standard of broadcast news.
“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?” Fox said in a press release about the study. “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 that she gets her news mostly from local and regional newspapers, but is also an occasional “The Daily Show” viewer.
“I do watch ‘The Daily Show.’ It’s not my primary source of news, but I enjoy it,” she said.
And for the foreseeable future, Stephen Colbert, Stewart’s mock-commentator compadre, is not up for study. His show, “The Colbert Report,” skewers cable news personalities like Bill O’Reilly.
“It’s much more satirical. If you did a head-to-head comparison I don’t think it would be anywhere near as substantive,” Fox said.
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