News brings comedy, laughs?
April 6, 2006 by REBECCA BOWEN
Filed under News
“The Daily Show” calls itself “The Mistrusted Name in News,” and now there is scholarly evidence to prove it.
Though polling data reveals young adults increasingly rely on comedy shows for their news, research by University journalism professor Barry Hollander suggests laughter and learning are not as compatible as they may seem.
“We all want to feel like we know what’s going on,” he said. The question, he added, is whether people glued to programs such as “The Daily Show” and “Late Night with David Letterman” are actually learning anything or just being given a false sense of awareness.
Hollander based his research, which was published in the December issue of Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, on a 2004 poll by the Pew research center. The poll stated 21 percent of people under age 30 use comedy shows as primary sources for campaign news. This more than doubled the percentage of a poll from 2000.
Hollander compared information from the Pew survey that tested respondents’ abilities to correctly answer two kinds of campaign-related questions – recall and recognition.
Questions of recall are open-ended, whereas recognition is similar to multiple choice. Most respondents, 62 percent, did not do well on the harder recall tests.
This means although some recognized things like 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean’s statement that he wanted to win the votes of “guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,” fewer recalled which candidate served as a majority leader in the House of Representatives.
“It’s a selective representation of the news,” Hollander said of late-night comedy. “(Jon) Stewart is selecting the episodes he can make the most fun of and not the ones that are the most important.”
Such shows, he said, are part of the rising tide of blogs, talk radio and other entertainment-oriented programs that are in some ways replacing balanced, thoughtful news.
However, there is value in satire’s ability to “cut through the crap,” he said, calling Jon Stewart a modern Will Rogers or Mark Twain.
Plus, he said the coolness of appearing on “The Daily Show” attracts impressive and influential guests.
Patricia Moy, an associate professor of communication from the University of Washington, published research in 2001 that mentioned how politicians attempt to set an “image agenda” when they appear on entertainment programs.
“Late-night comedy shows offer politicians and candidates an opportunity to show a side of themselves citizens wouldn’t normally see,” she said in an e-mail. “One can be humorous and personal and still talk about serious issues.”
She found such shows improved candidates’ favorability ratings by emphasizing personality traits that humanized them.
Lindsey Stier, a junior from Oregon, said she does not think “The Daily Show” has any more of a bias than regular news programs.
The founder of the fan group “I Heart the Daily Show” on Facebook.com said she is very confident in her grasp on current events just from watching it regularly.
“It’s nice to see the show is taken more seriously,” she said.
