Being informed vs. feeling informed

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Beinginformedvs.feelinginformed
An examination of entertainment-based news and
whether such programs inform or create the sense
of being informed.

• Barry HollanderGrady CollegeUniversity of
  Georgia

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High school students use the news, just not in
traditional formats. They also see describe
alternative sources as news, such as The Daily
Show. Source The Future of the First Amendment
for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
(2006).

• 7

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What about young adults? How often do you watch
The Daily Show by Age Group?

• Source Pew Center for the People and the Press,
  July 30 2006, survey

• Young people tend to use other news-related
  media less often than other age categories except
  for listening to talk radio or watching morning
  news shows. The overall audience for The Daily
  Show is relatively small compared to other
  programs.

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Why knowledge matters

• An enlightened citizenry is considered one of the
  foundations of a successful democracy.
• Informed citizens are thought to be less
  susceptible to persuasion by emotional arguments
  or demagoguery.
• Despite dramatic increases in education and
  information sources, how much people know about
  public affairs has not significantly changed.
• Unfortunately, to say that much of the public is
  uninformed about much of the substance of
  politics and public policy is to say nothing new
  (Delli Carpini Keeter, 1992, p. 19).

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Measures of Knowledge

• Recall
• The traditional measure of knowledge, either
  to civics textbook or current events questions,
  that requires a respondent pull a correct answer
  from his or her head.
• Recognition
• Less traditional, multiple measures of
  whether a respondent recognizes or remembers
  something about a story or topic, a feeling of
  knowing.
• Estimate
• Respondents asked to estimate their level of
  knowledge. Similar to internal efficacy often
  modestly correlated with actual knowledge.

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Measures of Media Use

• Exposure
• Measures of mere exposure, from number of days
  used to scales that range from regularly to
  never for specific media. Fails to capture the
  haphazard nature of some media.
• Attention
• Typically builds on exposure and taps how much
  attention paid to a medium, a measure preferred
  by many to understand television and related
  media.
• Motivated Use
• Often used to measure use for a specific
  purpose, such as to keep up with news (i.e.,
  reliance). Helpful when asking about
  entertainment-based media with a news angle, such
  as The Daily Show or West Wing.

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• Soft and Hard News
• Many studies find no relationship between
  watching entertainment-based programs or soft
  news and political knowledge.
• Baum argues that soft news can lead to
  incidental learning by an inattentive public. He
  found an interaction with education and soft news
  use much like the one I found for talk radio
  exposure.
• Prior, in response to Baum, found very little
  support for the notion that soft news can lead to
  greater knowledge. He suggests instead political
  advertising may hold the key to informing the
  public.
• A recent experiment by Baumgartner Morris
  found that watching The Daily Show contributed
  greatly to a sense of being informed but greater
  cynicism about the political process.
• Brewer Cao found seeing a candidate on
  late-night or comedy shows can positively
  influence knowledge about the campaign.
• A study forthcoming in JOBEM suggests that The
  Daily Show with Jon Stewart contains as much
  substantive news coverage as traditional
  broadcast network newscasts.

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OneStudy
Multivariate Analysis Findings Watching
late-night shows such as Leno and Letterman to
keep up with the news, after statistical
controls, was negatively associated with with
recall but positively associated with
recognition. Watching such comedy programs as The
Daily Show to keep up with the news was
negatively associated with recall but unrelated
to recognition. Age did not interact with viewing
in the expected ways. For example, watching
comedy shows improved both recognition and recall
for younger viewers. Late-night viewing was not
associated with recognition regardless of age,
but for older respondents it led to less recall
as compared to younger viewers.
In a recent Journal of Broadcasting Electronic
Media piece (V49, 3, 2005) I examined the effect
of watching late-night and comedy programs to
keep up with the news. My dependent variables
were recall and recognition of political
information. I predicted an age interaction with
viewing based on my earlier published work on
talk radio. However, as is often the case, data
got in the way of a good theory.
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This StudyDoes watching The Daily Show affect
young viewers different than other viewers on
knowledge or the sense of being informed.
Data drawn from the 2004 Pew Biennial Media
Consumption Survey. My thanks to the Pew Center
for making these data available. All
interpretations are my own.

• Political Knowledge (4-item index)
• Do you happen to know which political party has a
  majority in the U.S. House of Representatives?
• Do you know the name of the terrorist
  organization that is responsible for the
  September 11th attacks on the United States?
• In the recent trial involving Martha Stewart, can
  you recall whether (she was found guilty/she was
  found innocent/there was a mistrial)?
• Since the start of military action in Iraq last
  March, about how many U.S. soldiers have been
  killed? To the best of your knowledge, has it
  been under 500, 500 to 1000, 1000 to 2000, or
  more than 2000?
• Recognition (5-item index)
• How closely do you follow these issues? (4-point
  scale from very closely to not at all closely).
• News about the current situation in Iraq?
• News about candidates for the 2004 presidential
  election?
• The Sept 11 Commissions hearing on the 2001
  terrorist attacks?
• The high price of gasoline these days?

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Zero-order correlations among key variables

Non-significant correlations are excluded from
the table.
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Partial correlations by Age category controlling
for education, Income, sex, and race.
Significant partial correlations are greater
than .10 or less than -.10 on this table.
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For TV News and Newspapers, different results

Partial correlations controlling for age,
education, income, and sex.. For TV news, an r
.07 is significant. For newspapers, an r .15
is significant.
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What is it about The Daily Show?

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Is there something special about this preference
for humor in news? By age, some interesting
results emerge. Among the youngest respondents,
there is a significant association between a
preference for such news and recognition, one not
seen in other age groups.

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This is a first blush at analyses examining the
relationship between entertainment-based news and
how much young people learn or think they learn
from such programs.Whether such programs
replace traditional news for some people,
particularly younger citizens, remains an open
question.

If you watch the news and don't like it, then
this is your counter program to the news. Some
people confuse us with a news show. And that
either says something terrible about the state of
news in this country or something terrible about
the state of comedy on this program. Jon Stewart