Understanding The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Effects in a New Media Environment

Abstract

As The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has earned widespread attention for its perceived impacts on politics, the nature and extent of those effects have been disputed. While there is a growing body of research on this topic across several academic disciplines, it has generally been received as inconclusive. The Daily Show has been a particularly befuddling example of the indistinct boundary that divides news and entertainment, thereby exposing the pitfalls of conducting research based on the presumption that such a line exists. I propose a new theoretical framework from which to interpret existing and future research, which focuses on changes in the political and media environments that have rendered older normative assumptions and methods ineffectual. Standards applied to broadcast news research do not map well onto political satire, which is part of the reason why TDS research has produced results that seem contradictory according to older frameworks. Likewise, disciplinary divisions have effectively prevented complementary research works from entering into dialogue with one another. By approaching these questions about TDS from a perspective befitting political satire in a 21st century media environment, I connect existing research in a more coherent manner than what currently exists. With this framework as a guide, I demonstrate that TDS benefits democracy by increasing attentiveness to politics among what would otherwise be inattentive viewers, promoting a discerning orientation towards politics, and empowering viewers to understand and engage with the political world.