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Daily Show & Colbert Report Watchers Better Informed

The Pew Research Center has released a new survey, "Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Changed by News and Information Revolutions," which has some interesting data on the relationship between news sources and current affairs knowledge.

A new survey of 1,502 adults released Sunday by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that despite the mass appeal of the Internet and cable news since a previous poll in 1989, Americans' knowledge of national affairs has slipped a little. For example, only 69% know that Dick Cheney is vice president, while 74% could identify Dan Quayle in that post in 1989.

Other details are equally eye-opening. Pew judged the levels of knowledgeability (correct answers) among those surveyed and found that those who scored the highest were regular watchers of Comedy Central's The Daily Show and Colbert Report. They tied with regular readers of major newspapers in the top spot -- with 54% of them getting 2 out of 3 questions correct. Watchers of the Lehrer News Hour on PBS followed just behind.

Which actually isn't surprising (to me at least). TDS and CR are satirical, but in an insider way—they both actually contain a lot of accurate content about current events, so they both inform and poke fun simultaneously. And it's difficult to get much of the humor on these shows unless you actually know a little bit about what's being satirized. (Which doesn't necessarily indicate that these shows are the best possible information sources.... Only that they're as good or better than other popular sources on very large scale current events.)

[via Editor & Publisher]