Do People Actually Learn from Colbert and Stewart?

We've had some time now to review an emerging body of work that asks whether people learn from such faux news programs as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report.  While I'm not going to bore you with a formal lit review, I will try to summarize what we know so far about the effects of such "soft news" programs.

• People view such programs differently than traditional news.  Call this the couch potato hypothesis.  With less mental effort you get less learning.  After all, most people sit down in front of the TV to be entertained and even when they do try to be informed by such content, the brain is wired differently. 

• Similar to above is the empty-calorie hypothesis, that idea that people will rely on humorous forms of news and feel filled up, like sucking on a Coke, and won't consume their vegetables (real news).  The result?  Less knowledge.

• What you know matters.  Well-informed folks glean more from an information source than less-informed.  That said, TV best serves those who know least, especially TV news, because of the way TV tells a story versus the traditional inverted pyramid of print news, which with its emphasis on the latest information first assumes prior knowledge.

• Humor is thought to get in the way of learning, but to help in persuasion.  The theory is straightforward -- humor lowers our defenses, reduces counter-arguing, and is therefore more likely to persuade.  But humor interferes with actual learning.

• The content of these faux news programs resembles in some ways the TV newscasts.  Content analyses find many similarities, though these also find dramatic differences.  It's hard to make tragedy funny, and often Colbert and Stewart take the easy way out, the easy laugh, because it can backfire if you try to make a tragedy into something it's not.  Quite simply, unless you're consuming traditional news, there are huge holes in your information, gaps found in news quizzes or measures of political knowledge.

• But ... the people who watch these programs tend to be news junkies anyway, well-educated and young, people who "get" the jokes because they're at least moderately informed.

• Finally, it's that "moderate" thing that matters.  It's the folks who attend to no news but watch these programs who come out losers, at least as measured by tests of political knowledge.

• Beware the methodological mess-up.  Sometimes scholars will combine these two shows with the late-night talk shows (i.e., Jay Leno).  They are not the same.  Different content, different audiences, different results.  I'm in the middle of a study that finds, today, you really have to ask about exposure to specific networks (Fox News, etc.) and even specific programs (The O'Reilly Factor) to get at the kinds of effects that matter in political communication.

Stewart vs. Colbert

There is an emerging bit of scholarly work that suggests those two popular comedy faux news programs -- Jon Stewart's The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert's The Colbert Report -- have very different effects on their audiences.

Stewart's show is more straightforward.  He slams Republicans, occasionally Democrats, but basically you know where's coming from. Colbert is more sneaky.  He plays a Republican blowhard to make fun of Republicans and blowhards.  But his approach confuses some.  In other words, he nudges people to like Republicans and those he satirizes, according to one study.

Why mention this?  In part the issue is methodological.  You wouldn't want to measure exposure to the two programs and then collapse this into a single index called Exposure to Late Night Comedy.  There are enough differences, at least suggested in some published studies or a few under consideration at journals, that combining the two might, if not cancel one another out, create measurement error issues.  And I think I broke a personal record for the number of commas in a single sentence.  Apologies.

Lots of people mention such programs as a source of their news and information, as places that influence what people know.  If true, we must be careful in how we take these questions and combine them into a single variable.  In fact, best I can tell from some early data, this would be a mistake.

What dependent variables would this most likely influence?  Probably not knowledge so much as attitudinal items, such as like/dislike of candidates or even attitudes about major institutions such as Congress or the Press.  I don't see it influencing trust in government but it might influence internal or external efficacy.  In general, we need to carefully examine differences between these two programs on key criterion variables before simply combining them in a single index.

Do People Learn from Faux News?

It's been a question raised by scholars and by those somewhat, um, less scholarly -- do people learn from entertainment faux news programs such as the funny stuff by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? The answer so far has been mixed. Programs increase feelings of efficacy but decrease trust, seem to aid learning or perhaps not. They influence how people process the news, what factors they consider, or sometimes not.

So I'm re-reading a study in Journal of Communication by Kim and Vishak (story about it here). I blogged about it earlier, but I wanted to re-read the thing and see if any fresh ideas emerge other than what I blogged on earlier. The basics remain the same: mainstream news media exposure led to greater and more accurate knowledge in a controlled experiment than did The Daily Show.

What seems to explain the difference is the goal of the user. This gets a bit into uses and gratifications research. If my goal in watching Stewart is to be entertained, my brain engages with the program in a very different way than it does with CNN or reading news online. Let's face it, watching CNN is a lot of things, but entertaining ain't one of 'em. If my goal is to laugh at current events and politicians, then the brain is not in "learning" mode, thus actual learning decreases and the accuracy of what I remember suffers as well.

So it's in part what we bring to the TV. Yes, TV news suffers from delusions of adequacy, but when we catch up with the news we're in a different frame of mind, one willing to absorb and retain information -- if only a little since it's merely TV after all. When we sit to watch Colbert or Stewart be funny, it's a completely different take, even if people do say in surveys they watch such programs to keep up with the news.

Summing Up II

Yesterday I started to sum up what we know about media and political knowledge. An exercise in futility? Maybe. But it's spring break and if I'm not doing this I'll be outside painting the house. Lemme have my futility instead.

My earlier post focused on TV news. Now let's turn to another form of TV, that lovable hybrid called entertainment-faux-fake-news.

In other words, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. But also, if you stretch the definition, those late-night talk shows and even daytime programs.

So, what do we know?

Not a hell of a lot. I've read a lot of research about the two big programs. Done some myself. There is some suggestion that the folks who watch these two shows are already pretty high in political knowledge and kinda young too, an interesting combo. Mostly younger people do poorly on tests of political knowledge. My own work suggests that, for the least knowledgeable, these programs don't help a lot. Other work suggests they do.

And then there's the recent fun piece about Colbert's program nudging people to the political right.

In general two arguments emerge: these programs are the best things to happen to democracy, or these programs are the worst things to happen to democracy. Is satire and parody a good thing? Haven't we always had satire and parody? Is getting at the truth more important than following what to the public seems like obscure, silly, journalistic routines that balance a story to the point of giving even lying idiots a say?

Back to what we know. The audience is knowledgeable, some learning takes place, and these programs do feed how people interpret politicians and public figures. Ridicule is a powerful weapon, one Saturday Night Live did quite well in the 1970s with President Gerald Ford. But too much, some research suggests, might tip us over to even less trust in government. Yeah, trust is hardly a sexy thing to promote, but a democracy rests on a stable reservoir of trust existing out there, something drawn on when times get tough -- oh, like now.

Summing up my summing up -- we don't know a lot about the effects of these programs. Parody and satire and faux news seems to inform a few, entertain a lot, but there are suggestions that the laughter gets in the way of real learning. The most powerful effect may be a negative attitude toward the public figures ridiculed by these guys. Whether that's a good thing remains to be seen.