The Daily Show is much funnier than traditional newscasts, but a new study from Indiana University says it has the same amount of meat on its bones when it comes to coverage of the news. The brand of news coverage Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show's staff brings to the airwaves is just as substantive as traditional news programs like World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News, according to the study conducted by IU assistant professor of telecommunications Julia R. Fox and a couple of graduate students.

The researchers looked at coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions and the first presidential debate of the fall campaign, all of which were covered by the mainstream broadcast news outlets and The Daily Show. Individual broadcasts of the nightly news and corresponding episodes of The Daily Show were analyzed by the researchers, who found that the "average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories" were no different from The Daily Show. Perhaps more telling, The Daily Show delivered longer stories on the topic.

"It should be noted that the broadcast network news stories about the presidential election were significantly shorter, on average, than were The Daily Show with Jon Stewart stories," said Professor Fox. "The argument could be made that while the amount of substance per story was not significantly different, the proportion of each story devoted to substance was greater in the network news stories ... On the other hand, the proportion of stories per half hour program devoted to the election campaign was greater in The Daily Show."

Using the entire half-hour programs as the basis of analysis yielded the same results: there was just as much substance to The Daily Show's coverage as there was on the network news. And The Daily Show was much funnier, with less of the hypereferences to photo ops, political endorsements, and pollsthat typically overshadows substantive coverage on network news, according to the study.

What constitutes "substantive" coverage? Ars Technica spoke to Professor Fox who told us that the she and the other researchers defined substantive coverage as that which addressed issues included in the party platform or questions of candidate qualification. "It was the same definition I used in a previous study of network news coverage from 1988 to 2000," Professor Fox told Ars. "It is similar to criteria used by other scholars who examine political coverage'image vs. issue'but there's consensus within the scholarly and journalistic communities that anytime there is discussion of issues in a campaign, that's what would be considered substantive."

Is it time to tune out World News Tonight and tune into The Daily Show? Professor Fox doesn't think so, saying that "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."

It's ironic that Jon Stewart, who seldom hesitates to criticize the media, is turning out tongue-in-cheek content that is just as substantative. It also demonstrates that the mainstream media may not be so mainstream anymore, and that people looking for in-depth treatments of newsworthy topics are often best served by looking in places other than the evening news or The Daily Show, no matter how funny the latter is.

Professor Fox's study, titled "No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign," will be published next summer in the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media.

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