More and more college students, as well as people in general, are getting news from comedy programs such as Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.”

According to figures in 2005, “The Daily Show” garners about 1.4 million viewers nightly. Neilsen ratings put the show’s median viewer age at 35, much younger than traditional nightly news broadcasts.

“There have been a couple academic studies recently of those shows, where researchers study the actual news content in those shows compared to the broadcast news media,” said Rick Swanson, Ph.D., a political science professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “They discovered there was just as much actual news content – news information – given by “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show” as there are in the actual news media broadcasts. And so, believe it or not, students are learning just as much about the news as they would be if they were watching a mainstream news outlet.”

The study, completed this year by Julia Fox, a telecommunications professor at Indiana University, showed that “The Daily Show” had about as much hard information during the 2004 presidential campaign as the average nightly news broadcast.

“It is clearly a humor show, first and foremost,” Fox said about “The Daily Show.” “But there is some substance on there, and in some cases, like John Edwards announcing his candidacy, the news is made on the show.

“In an absolute sense, we should probably be concerned about both of those sources, because neither one is particularly substantive,” Fox continued. “It’s a bottom-line industry and ratings-driven. We live in an ‘infotainment’ society, and there certainly are a number of other sources available.”

“Personally, I think that the shows actually do a service,” said Swanson. “A lot of people have attacked or criticized the shows for bringing cynicism to public discourse, but I don’t think that there’s any more cynicism they could have than the bitter partisan fights we have had in recent years. What these shows do, I think, is correctly point out the absurdity in a lot of the claims of both those on the left and the right, and I watch the shows, and you often see that they do ridicule people on the extreme left and the extreme right, in general. What these shows point out is the hypocrisies and the absurdities of the arguments on both the far left and the far right, and I think that’s healthy. Free speech is always healthy, to expose these ideas for what they are.”

“[College students getting their news from “The Daily Show”] doesn’t really worry me,” said Pearson Cross, Ph.D., a political science professor at UL Lafayette. “Frankly, at this point, what you worry more about with getting news in terms of college students is that they don’t get any news, or they’re completely uninvolved. Obviously, Stewart’s show and Colbert are entertainment shows, but if it’s entertainment that gets people interested in what’s going on in the world, then I have no problem with that at all, and frankly, a lot of our news is pretty funny.”

Some college students do rely on the satirical programs as their main source of news.

“It’s really “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” that I get my daily update on what’s happening,” said Joshua Daigle, a history major at UL Lafayette who said he had political aspirations. “I try my best to read print, but the thing is–about the Daily Show and the Colbert Report–is that they mostly present facts and they make fun of the facts.”

Daigle said he felt that the shows could be more truthful, because they didn’t have any credibility to lose by being accused of biased.

“For instance,” said Daigle, “when Dick Cheney said there was a link between 9/11 and Iraq, that there was evidence to show that Iraqi agents and Al-Qaida agents had met, and then a few months later, never said that? ‘The Daily Show’ was the only one who could show that, and say they were false. Other news organizations can’t really do that, because they’d be called biased and lose credibility, but ‘The Daily Show’ has its own untouchable credibility. They don’t have anything to lose, so they can report the truth.”

“People are getting their news wherever they can, and it is high time that the professional world and the academics respect that fact, and tailor their teaching and their media to suit,” said William Davie, Ph.D., a broadcasting professor at UL Lafayette. “We come from a sacred temple–in our minds–that suggests the traditional journalist shall never dabble in opinion, bias or even humor without violating his sacred vow to the calling. Nonsense.”

Davie said he felt that “people want to feel good when they read the news. We have forgotten that. We have decided since the news is bad, we want you to feel bad. That is stupid. We have to treat the news more creatively. What does Jon Stewart do? He makes people laugh. He pokes fun at newsmakers. So he is not a traditional journalist. Rumsfeld calls him an opiner. I call him a metajournalist.”

A metajournalist, according to Davie, is “someone who takes the work of traditional journalists and profits from it mightily by either using it for humor, or as Rush Limbaugh does, using it for opining, for commentary. The public likes it. The public is not that offended because its intentionality is clearer.”

Davie also said he felt the traditional journalists have to learn to accept the new “metajournalists,” because it is important that the same accountability for facts apply to both. He said one thing he was worried about was the trivialization of the traditional journalist on opinion programs, because the programs get their material from traditional sources while sometimes mocking the same sources. Davie also said he felt the shows were beneficial in their criticism of mainstream media outlets.

“I just can’t imagine anyone being interested in ‘The Daily Show’ if they weren’t interested in traditional journalism as well,” he said.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 10:05 am and is filed under features, vermilion.