[mandmandam]

Multiple studies over those years showed that The Daily Show watchers were significantly better informed on issues than cable news viewers.

Cable news is the junk food, and TDS showed it to be so bad that even a parody news show could do a better job of informing people, a point made very often by the host. Using it as an example of junk news is missing the point by a rather wide margin.

> Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.

It's all coming from the same six companies, as per the article. It all has a lot of the same messaging - trust the police, the good guys always win, torture is bad but if you have a good reason it's ok, Islam is super scary yo, capitalism is cool actually, being too smart isn't cool, and leave the status quo the fuck alone or get Avengered.

... Turn your brain off at your peril. Junk food can kill. If you really feel the need to watch absolute garbage and ignore the news, you probably need to work less and/or sleep more.

[kaashif]

> Multiple studies over those years showed that The Daily Show watchers were significantly better informed on issues than cable news viewers.

This comment only makes sense if you're trying to imply the Daily Show increases how informed people are.

It seems plausible that causation runs the other way: more informed people are more likely to watch the Daily Show, because then they get all the jokes.

[steveBK123]

Precisely. The Daily Show was a predecessor to Twitter political culture and remains the offline version of it. Blue Flavored Fox News with more laughs.

It's the same political culture of preaching to the already converted and mostly shouting about how bad the other side is. No attempts at persuasion.

[vundercind]

It definitely doesn’t have as big a problem with manufacturing outrage “news” out of nothing at all, like Fox does (and its pal, AM radio). They’ll routinely report ordinary things without history or context in order to imply they’re both new and bad (and they may be bad, but not for the reasons they imply, which often simply aren’t real)

I sometimes wonder if people who compare things like the daily show or John Oliver to Fox News have watched Fox News at all in the last 15 years or so.

[mrbombastic]

There is no doubt a blue bent, but I think the fact that it says on the tin that it is satire gives it a leg up on fox news which purports to be, ya know, news. And I think you’ll find that Jon Stewart at least tries to acknowledge the argument of the other side even more than say CNN. For example he was very willing to acknowledge early on that the concerns about Joe Biden’s age were legitimate before a lot of the other blue leaning media realized they could’nt deny it any more. I’d say Bill Maher and some of the talk shows that have gone political are closer to twitter offline, more focused on gotcha moments than real arguments.

[mandmandam]

The correlation vs causation question is interesting, but not the original topic. Whether smart people avoid corporate news, or corporate news makes people dumber, either way the problem is corporate news.

And TDS is not a great example of that, because from the start it was an explicitly self-aware reaction to the awfulness of corporate news.

[pjc50]

Wasn't there a study which showed that UK tabloid readers were worse informed than people who simply didn't pay attention to the news at all?

[fsagx]

It's not a new observation. More than a century ago, Mark Twain observed: "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."

[mandmandam]

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." -Thomas Jefferson, 1807

As a result of this thread I looked into the first US newspaper and discovered it was shut down after one issue because they printed something a governor didn't like, lol. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publick_Occurrences_Both_Forre...