Julia Fox that is...
Julia R. Fox is an assistant professor of telecommunications at University of Indiana who has done a great service with two grad students by spending valuable time watching the bradcast news and comparing it to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She and her team have produced a study called
"No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign"
read all about it and its delightful findings below to finally justify why you watch TDS.
Not surprisingly her study finds that the
"fake news" program, which last week featured Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as a guest, is just as substantive as network coverage...sometimes the banter and questions get a little silly, but there is also substantive dialogue going on ... It's a legitimate source of news."
Fox's study found in a second-by-second analysis of The Daily Show's audio and visual content stunningly has
considerably more humor than substance
The same second-by second disection of broadcast news found
considerably more hype than substance.Examples of such hype included references to polls, political endorsements and photo opportunities.
Fox contends that a reason why The Daily Show may have evolved the way it has...
We've been wringing our hands for decades that the networks aren't doing enough substance in the political coverage, so is it any real surprise that it's just as substantive?...Our findings should allay at least some of the concerns about the growing reliance on this non-traditional source of political information, as it is just as substantive as the source that Americans have relied upon for decades.
But Stewart's mantra of "I'm just a comedian. Don't take this show seriously" is in the end supported and network news damned because Fox says...
In an absolute sense, we should probably be concerned about both of those sources, because neither one is particularly substantive. It's a bottom-line industry and ratings-driven. We live in an 'infotainment' society, and there certainly are a number of other sources available."
Oh, well. The news couldn't be all good.