The Price of Admission

I have never totally bought into the idea that my generation is getting all of its political news from The Daily Show, and a new scientific study has proven that skepticism correct.

According to a new study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, The Daily Show actually consists of high-order political satire. In order to get the jokes, you have to know what's going on, so the buy-in for The Daily Show is engagement on current events.

I think it is interesting that The Daily Show's structure is empirically similar to the talking head shows on the 24 hour news networks, implying that those shows are also not actually engineered for delivering the news. Rather, they are solely for talking about the news and giving opinion and analysis. This isn't a surprise to me but I had never really thought about them in that same context, that they were essentially the same on that fundamental level. That probably also has something to do with how I trust Jon Stewart even though he's a comedian way more than I would ever trust Brit Hume or Lou Dobbs. Like, I wouldn't trust them to watch my car while I ran in the store, or to make a sandwich without doing harm.