What The Daily Show Is Doing for News Credibility

From all academic.com, I found an article entitled “‘Truthiness’ and Satire News: Influence of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Television News Credibility,” which I obviously believed to be perfect for the subject at hand (citation below). The article both provided interesting data and raised many interesting questions.

Many people will deservedly question the credibility of either Daily Show or The Colbert Report when they watch it, but what the article warns more about is people who watch those shows questioning the credibility of the news that those shows parody, and – like it or not – that has become the trend. A third of the people who watch The Daily Show are under the age of 30. These people, according to the essay, treat the show for “political information consumption” as much as they do for entertainment, and “Previous research suggests that Daily Show viewing correlates with lower levels of trust in the news media.”

Clearly, what we have is a large group of Americans about to take over the “power” of the country who no longer believe in the news media. How big of a problem this is depends on your perspective. The media will still go on, whether people believe in them or not; all you have to do is remember that without the media, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would be unknowns. Their shows thrive because they target the media. Another thing to keep in mind as well is that while it could just be gamesmanship, some members of the news media have actually publicly stated that they enjoy what The Daily Show is doing for their craft. Respected anchor Brian Williams said to Stewart that Stewart’s watchful eye over the media has increased their performance and attention to fact checking because they know that if they slip, they’ll be hearing about it the next night at 10 p.m. on Comedy Central.

I by no means am a person that won’t believe a news story until Jon Stewart tells me I can do so, but before journalism majors start changing their majors, that last point is one to bear in mind.

Stewart, Daxton. and Littau, Jeremy. ""Truthiness" and Satire News: The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Television News Credibility" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Marriott Downtown, Chicago, IL, Aug 06, 2008 . 2010-11-12