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Originally Posted by maximusveritas
The study SecretMethod referenced compared the Daily Show to Leno and Letterman, not to the news networks, so the result is not too surprising.
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The study compared late-night comedy show viewers (which included Daily Show viewers) with non-late-night comedy show viewers. This allowed a comparison between Leno/Letterman/Stewart, but overall it demonstrated that, all else being equal (whether or how much non-comedy news information was viewed), viewers of late-night comedy were more knowledgeable about current events than non-viewers of late-night comedy.
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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.
The Annenberg survey found that people who watch The Daily Show are more interested in the presidential campaign, more educated, younger, and more liberal than the average American or than Leno or Letterman viewers. “However, these factors do not explain the difference in levels of campaign knowledge between people who watch The Daily Show and people who do not,” Young pointed out. “In fact, Daily Show viewers have higher campaign knowledge than national news viewers and newspaper readers -- even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age, and gender are taken into consideration.”
http://www.business-journal.com/NoJo...KnowIssues.asp
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