Jon Stewart's fans are a pretty knowledgeable bunch, but so are Bill O'Reilly's.
In an aside on a post yesterday about the Virginia Tech shootings, Durham blogger Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies argues that two WRDU radio hosts are ill-informed, perhaps because of what they watch:
maybe it's Fox News, which a recent Pew Center study found was the news source most likely to produce uninformed viewers (those most up on current events, Pew found, where watchers of The Daily Show and Colbert Report on Comedy Central).
But click through to that study and you'll see two things wrong with the summary:
* The audience for "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" was essentially tied with that of major newspaper Web sites, Jim Lehrer's "NewsHour" on PBS, "The O'Reilly Factor" on the previously mentioned Fox News Channel, National Public Radio and Rush Limbaugh's radio show.
* The study does not say that watching the show informed the audience, necessarily.
As the authors write:
The fact that a particular news source's audience is very knowledgeable does not mean that people learned all that they know from that source. As noted earlier, some news sources draw especially well-educated audiences who are keenly interested in politics.
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