Go figure, watching Comedy Central’s fake news show helps you to be better informed about current events and politics.
… “Daily Show” viewers know more about election issues than people who regularly read newspapers or watch television news, according to the National Annenberg Election Survey.
Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, a senior research analyst at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, said “Daily Show” viewers came out on top “even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age and gender are taken into consideration.”
I was particularly struck by the difference between Daily Show viewers and casual newspaper readers.
While viewers of NBC’s “The Tonight Show” and CBS’ “The Late Show” scored better than the general public, Stewart’s fans came out on top.
Forty-nine percent of Leno and Letterman viewers got a perfect score on the quiz.
But 60 percent of “Daily Show” viewers answered all six questions correctly.
Just 42 percent of those who read a newspaper four days a week aced the test. Only 40 percent of those who watch network news four days a week got every answer right.
Which, naturally, leads me to wonder how Daily Show viewers would stack up against Fox News viewers.
Who could forget the report published by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland last fall, which documented quite clearly that Fox News viewers were more likely to be uninformed than those who received information from any other source.
It was stunning to see how wrong these people were. Those who relied on the conservative network for news, PIPA reported, were “three times more likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions — about WMD in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11, and foreign support for the U.S. position on the war in Iraq.
Looking at the misperceptions one at a time, people were asked, for example, if the U.S. had discovered the alleged stockpiles of WMD in Iraq since the war began. Just 11% of those who relied on newspapers as their “primary news source” incorrectly believed that U.S. forces had made such a discovery. Only slightly more — 17% — of those who relied on NPR and PBS were wrong. Yet 33% of Fox News viewers were wrong, far ahead of those who relied on any other outlet.
Likewise, when people were asked if the U.S. had “clear evidence” that Saddam Hussein was “working closely with al Queda,” similar results were found. Only 16% of NPR and PBS listeners/viewers believed that the U.S. has such evidence, while 67% of Fox News viewers were under that mistaken impression.
Overall, 80 percent of those who relied on Fox News as their primary news source believed at least one of the three misperceptions. Viewers/listeners/readers of other news outlets didn’t even come close to this total.
In other words, Fox News viewers are literally less informed about these basic facts. They have, put simply, been led to believe things that are simply not true. These poor dupes would have done better in this survey, statistically speaking, if they received no news at all and simply guessed whether the claims were accurate.
The moral of the story is watching a self-described fake news show on Comedy Central keeps you better informed, while watching a self-described “real” news network keeps you uninformed. Scary, isn’t it?