The Daily Show: Journalism, Satire or Just Laughs?

May 8, 2008

When Americans last year were asked to name the journalist they most admired, showing up at No. 4 on the list was a comedian. Jon Stewart, host of "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central and former master of ceremonies at Academy Award shows, tied in the rankings with anchormen Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and cable host Anderson Cooper¹.

Are Americans confused? What is Stewart doing on his program, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," that might cause people to consider him a journalist? How is the show similar to, and different from, what people get from the mainstream press? Beyond that, who -- and what -- gets skewered by Stewart and company, and who does not?

For answers, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism studied the content of "The Daily Show" for an entire year (2007), compared its news agenda with that of the more traditional news media, examined the lineup of guests and segments and tried to place the program into some kind of media context².

The results reveal a television program that draws on the news events of the day but picks selectively among them -- heavily emphasizing national politics and ignoring other news events entirely. In that regard, "The Daily Show" closely resembles the news agenda of a number of cable news programs as well as talk radio.

The program also makes heavy use of news footage, often in a documentary way that employs archival video to show contrast and contradiction, even if the purpose is satirical rather than reportorial. At other times, the show also blends facts and fantasy in a way that no news program, one hopes, ever would. In addition, "The Daily Show" not only assumes, but even requires, previous and significant knowledge of the news on the part of viewers if they want to get the joke. And, in 2007 at least, the joke was more often on the Bush administration and its fellow Republicans than on those from the liberal side of the aisle.

Among the study's findings:

• The program's clearest focus is politics, especially in Washington. U.S. foreign affairs, largely dominated by the Bush administration's policies in Iraq, Washington politics and government accounted for nearly half (47%) of the time spent on the program. Overall, "The Daily Show" news agenda is quite close to those of cable news talk shows.
• The press itself is another significant focus on "The Daily Show." In all, segments about the press and news media accounted for 8% of program time. That is more than double the amount of coverage of media in the mainstream press overall during the same period.
• A good deal of the news, however, is also absent from "The Daily Show." In 2007, for example, major events such as the tragic Minneapolis bridge collapse were never discussed. And the shootings at Virginia Tech, the most covered story within a given week in 2007 by the overall press, received only a cursory mention.
• Republicans in 2007 tended to bear the brunt of ridicule from Stewart and his crew. From July 1 through November 1, Stewart's humor targeted Republicans more than three times as often as Democrats. The Bush administration alone was the focus of almost a quarter (22%) of the segments in this time period.
• The lineup of on-air guests was more evenly balanced by political party. But our subjective sense from viewing the segments is that Republicans faced harsher criticism during their interviews with Stewart. Whether this is because the show is simply liberal or because the Republicans control the White House is harder to pin down.

Stewart has always insisted that his show isn't journalism and given its comedic core, its blurring of truth and fiction, and its ignoring of many major events, that is true in a traditional sense.

But it's also true that, at times, "The Daily Show" aims at more than comedy. In its choice of topics, its use of news footage to deconstruct the manipulations by public figures and its tendency toward pointed satire over playing just for laughs, "The Daily Show" performs a function that is close to journalistic in nature -- getting people to think critically about the public square. In that sense, it is a variation of the tradition of Russell Baker, Art Hoppe, Art Buchwald, H.L. Mencken and other satirists who once graced the pages of American newspapers.

How popular is "The Daily Show"? According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in April 2007, 16% of Americans said they regularly watched "The Daily Show" or the Comedy Central spin-off, "The Colbert Report." Those numbers are comparable to some major news programs. For instance, 17% said they regularly watched Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor," and 14% watched PBS' "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" regularly³.

The survey also suggests that viewers of the show are highly informed, an indication that "The Daily Show" is not their lone source of news. Regular viewers of "The Daily Show" and the Colbert Report were most likely to score in the highest percentile on knowledge of current affairs⁴.

"The Daily Show", which launched in 1996, now has an average audience of about 1.8 million⁵. By comparison, Fox News' primetime show "Hannity & Colmes" had an average audience of 1.9 million in the first quarter of 2008, and CNN's highest rated show, "Election Center," captured an average of 1.2 million viewers⁶. Stewart became host of the Show in 1999 and also serves as a writer and co-executive producer.

Structurally, "The Daily Show" combines elements of both traditional news shows and late night variety programs. Two commercial segments divide the 30 minute show into three distinct parts. Typically the first segment consists of Stewart's monologue, which often uses video and audio clips. The second segment usually brings in correspondents who do skits, or staged interviews with Stewart. The third, and final, act of the show consists of a guest interview. Guests range from celebrities to historians and politicians⁷.

What's on -- and not on -- "The Daily Show"

Overall, range of topics on "The Daily Show" is somewhat more limited than the mainstream press. Yet in many ways the similarities between the comedy show and the news media are as striking as the differences.

Both "The Daily Show" and the press generally, for instance, had the same No. 1 topic for the year, U.S. Foreign Affairs, a category dominated by the war in Iraq. It consumed 17% of the time on "The Daily Show" and 19% in the press overall. Politics, particularly the race for president, was the No. 2 topic in both as well, though it garnered an even larger share in "The Daily Show" (16% vs. 12%). And in both the mainstream press and "The Daily Show", the top three topic areas commanded the lion's share of time -- 47% on "The Daily Show" and 40% in the mainstream press.

But the news agenda soon begins to diverge. "The Daily Show" is more focused on political matters and is more Washington-oriented than the press overall. The show's No. 3 subject matter was government (15% of the newshole), whereas that topic ranked only 5th in the press overall (7%). "The Daily Show" was also more interested in lifestyle news, celebrities, and talking about the media itself.

In contrast, the mainstream news media focused more on such matters as foreign events not associated with the United States, crime, disasters, health, business and the economy.

In general, it is probably fair to say that the purview of the comedy show is more limited. The top six topics on "The Daily Show", for instance, made up 69% of all the time, while the top six topics in the media generally filled 60% of its newshole.

One can see this narrow focus even more clearly by looking not at the broad topics covered but more specifically on the exact stories. As an example, the presidential campaign and the policy debate about the war in Iraq together added up to a quarter of the time spent on "The Daily Show" (26%) for the year⁸. This was significantly more than in the mainstream press, where the two stories commanded 18% of the newshole studied during the same time period.

To illustrate that more limited range, it is helpful to note the subjects that "The Daily Show" de-emphasized -- or completely ignored -- in 2007. As Stewart described it to the host of PBS' "Bill Moyers' Journal", "we feel no obligation to follow the news cycle…because… we're not journalists⁹."

Looking at which topics the show does and does not discuss also provides insight into editorial limitations on a program that relies so heavily on satire and comedy. While politicians and celebrities are easy to lampoon, such an approach is often out of bounds when it comes to tragedies and disasters. The August 2 bridge collapse in Minneapolis that killed 13 people accounted for 55% of the mainstream media's coverage that day. It was not once mentioned on "The Daily Show". And the single largest story for any given week in 2007 -- the Virginia Tech shooting -- was all but absent from "The Daily Show".

On April 16, the evening of the shootings, Stewart began his broadcast by stating that the show was not going to focus on the incident because of the desire to keep things light and funny. Stewart began, "Obviously for anybody who has been tuned to the television today, a horrible, horrible day. I have absolutely nothing to add that is insightful or anything. I will just do what I always do when faced with something that is that powerfully damaging to the emotional core: I will begin to repress it, and I will swallow it. And I imagine that thirty years from now someone will spill juice and I will freak the f*** out. So to that end, let's move on as though the world is ok."

In that broadcast Stewart doesn't once refer to the incident itself by name.

Indeed, on many occasions, the top story in the national news media was quite different from the leading content on "The Daily Show". On January 15, for instance, most mainstream news shows led with the story of severe weather and ice storms causing havoc across much of the nation. Stewart began his show by pondering what drink would be best to wash down a Jimmy Dean pancake and sausage on a stick. "On a stick, of course, because anybody eating chocolate chip pancakes and sausage is clearly on the go," Stewart joked. (He decided on Gatorade A.M.).

Read the full analysis including video clips from "The Daily Show."

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¹Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, "Today's Journalists Less Prominent," March 8, 2007.

²Traditional news media consists of a list of 48 news outlets that are a part of PEJ's weekly News Coverage Index.

³Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, "Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions: What Americans Know: 1989-2007." April 15, 2007.

⁴"Well-informed audiences come from cable (Daily Show/Colbert Report, O'Reilly Factor), the internet (especially major newspaper websites), broadcast TV (NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) and radio (NPR, Rush Limbaugh's program)."

⁵Average total viewers, 2008 year to date. Viewership data provided by Comedy Central, April 29 2008

⁶Source: Nielsen Media Research analysis at MediaBistro.com.

⁷Once in a while guests appear for two separate segments: the second as well as the third. This is most frequently true for the most prominent figures, such as presidential front-runners etc.
Also, in one instance in 2007, a guest interview (with Ali Allawi on April 18) was aired as third and second to last story. A report on the falling stock market was the last story.

⁸Even though the stories about the debate over war policy in Iraq took place in Washington D.C., many of those segments were coded as "foreign affairs" because of their broad topic.

⁹Bill Moyers' Journal, PBS. April 27, 2007.