A study conducted by IU assistant professor of telecommunications Julia R. Fox of Indiana University has found that Jon Stewart’s ‘The Daily Show’ offers news coverage that is just as substantive as traditional newscasts. The professor and a couple of graduate students compared The Daily Show’s coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican conventions as well as the first presidential debate of the fall campaign with that delivered by programs like World News Tonight and CBS Evening News.

Professor Fox, whose name is mildly ironic to me, says that the proportion of stories per half hour were actually greater in the Daily Show than that of mainstream broadcasts devoted entirely to the election campaign. Fox verified that �the broadcast network news stories about the presidential election were significantly shorter, on average, than were The Daily Show with Jon Stewart stories.”

Using the entire half-hour programs as the basis of analysis yielded the same results: there was just as much substance to The Daily Show’s coverage as there was on the network news. And The Daily Show was much funnier, with less of the hype�references to photo ops, political endorsements, and polls�that typically overshadows substantive coverage on network news, according to the study.

So does this mean the Daily Show is more of a real news show than the mainstream news? Yes, but it still doesn�t mean the Daily Show is actually a news show. Rather, it exposes the sorry state of the media in our country. The fact that a self-proclaimed “fake news program” is more of a legitimate source than the mainstream news is appalling. Of course it�s also noteworthy to mention previous studies which say that viewers of the Daily Show are 78 percent more likely than the average adult to have attended college for four or more years, and more informed on election issues than people who read newspapers or watch TV news. Satirical or not, the Daily Show is informative and those with enough intelligence know it. Now if we could only raise the standard of our news programs to match or surpass that of our comedy shows.

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