I haven't really collected all my thoughts on this weekend's Stewart/Colbert rally, but I just wanted to respond to this argument from my friend Steve Benen, who in turn was reacting to FOX News personalities expressing barely concealed envy at the rally's turnout:
First, many folks probably do consider these comedians "news people," but those viewers tend to be pretty sharp. In 2004, the National Annenberg Election Survey found that Fox News viewers were the most confused about current events, while viewers of "The Daily Show" were among the best informed news consumers in the country. Comedy Central, relying on data from Nielsen Media Research, also found that Stewart's audience not only knew more about current events, but were far better educated than Bill O'Reilly's audience.
Three years later, the Pew Research Study published a report showing that "viewers of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report have the highest knowledge of national and international affairs, while Fox News viewers rank nearly dead last."
I actually interviewed someone at Pew about that study while I was in grad school for a story I was doing about political comedy, and the reason viewers of Stewart and Colbert are so well informed isn't because both shows are so informative. Rather it's because you have to be fairly well informed in order to get the jokes, and as a result their viewers tend to be the kind of people who get their news from a variety of informative and accurate sources. Colbert and Stewart's audiences were also only a few points higher than Limbaugh/O'Reilly, and that's because you also have to be fairly well informed to understand follow along with what they're saying.
It's true that viewers of FOX News alone, however, do extremely poorly.
