The Business Journal Online reports on an Annenberg survey that finds people who watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart are more likely to know the issue positions and backgrounds of presidential candidates than people who do not watch late-night comedy.

"In recent years ... traditional journalists have been voicing increasing concern that if young people are receiving political information from late-night comedy shows like The Daily Show, they may not be adequately informed on the issues of the day. This data suggests that these fears may be unsubstantiated. We find no differences in campaign knowledge between young people who watch Leno and Letterman – programs with a lot of political humor in their opening monologues -- and those who do not watch late-night. But when looking at young people who watch The Daily Show, we find they score higher on campaign knowledge than young people who do not watch the show, even when education, following politics, party identification, gender, viewing network news, reading the newspaper, watching cable news and getting campaign information on-line are taken into account."

While this does not mean the Daily Show makes people more politically aware, it shows the sample audience is more aware of the pertinent issues and facts. So for me, the full results of the survey and Annenberg's review of the content of each night-time comedy show were very interesting to read, especially when you compare and contrast the actual content of different shows, such as The Tonight Show and Late Night.

This helps explain why, even for someone like me who does not necessarily agree with Jon Stewart's political positions or leanings, The Daily Show is a program I look forward to watching - I TiVo it every day. It's funny and in fact does address the issues in its own way. It's comedy, so you have to take all of it with a grain of salt, but if nothing else, it's one more place for intelligent people to process the vast amounts of information (both relevant and irrelevant) that makes up this never-ending election cycle.

Note: You can view the actual Annenberg Center news release, which contains the full survey questions, results and analysis here. [PDF]

The Annenberg Public Policy Center also operates FactCheck.org, I site I mentioned recently here, which does an excellent job of non-partisan review of the advertisements and other messages put out by the political campaigns, with the tag-line, "Holding Politicians Accountable."

Survey Excerpts:

"Polling conducted between July 15 and Sept. 19 among 19,013 adults showed that on a six-item political knowledge test people who did not watch any late-night comedy programs in the past week answered 2.62 items correctly, while viewers of Late Night with David Letterman on CBS answered 2.91, viewers of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno answered 2.95, and viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart answered 3.59 items correctly. That meant there was a difference of 16 percentage points between Daily Show viewers and people who did not watch any late-night programming."

"Young people who watched The Daily Show scored 48% correct on the campaign knowledge test while young people who did not watch any late-night comedy scored 39% correct. Meanwhile, young people who watched four of more days of network news scored 40% correct, equally frequent cable news viewers 48% correct and newspaper readers 46% correct."

"Of the 83 political jokes made by Stewart, only 9 specifically targeted Bush. That was 11 percent of his political jokes. The same number targeted Kerry."

"The Daily Show segments are less likely than a Leno or Letterman joke to use a quick punch-line to make fun of a candidate ... Instead, Stewart’s lengthier segments employ irony to explore policy issues, news events, and even the media’s coverage of the campaign."

  • Thanks to Betsy over at My Whim is Law for the pointer.