Jon Stewart is Better News Than the "Real" Thing

Move over ABC, CBS and NBC. Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show," featured nightly on Comedy Central, contains as much substantial news as evening network news shows, according to findings by a study conducted at IU.

Julia Fox, an assistant professor of telecommunications at IU and graduate students Glory Koloen and Volkan Sahin conducted research that found Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" to be as substantive as the major news networks, defining substantive news as coverage that referred to political issues and candidate qualifications in the 2004 election, according to the study released Wednesday.

The study, which is the first of its kind, was created to show the amount of substance found during news coverage of the 2004 presidential election. The researchers were also looking for find the sources from which people younger than 30 got their news during the election. Statistically, the study found as much substantive news on "The Daily Show" as on "ABC Evening News," "CBS Evening News" and "NBC Nightly News."

"We coded all of the video and audio that was about the presidential election, and we used the coding scheme that has indicators of what we consider being substance," Fox said. "There were just as many issues and references in 'The Daily Show' as there were in the networks."