We're Learning More From Stephen Colbert Than The Actual News, Study Says
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/02/colbert-news-study-campaign-financing_n_5431713.htmlA recent study concluded that "The Colbert Report" did a better job of teaching people about campaign finance in the last presidential election than MSNBC, CNN, Fox News or broadcast evening news. The study — published in Mass Communication and Society and led by a senior researcher at the University of Pennsylvania — surveyed 1,232 adults and tested respondents' knowledge of campaign finance from a variety of sources.
"['The Colbert Report'] not only increased people’s perceptions that they knew more about political financing, but significantly increased their actual knowledge, and did so at a greater rate than other news sources," the university's Annenberg Public Policy Center wrote in a statement.
The study is not the first that concludes viewers of fake news shows like "The Colbert Report" are more informed than those of other news sources. In 2012, another study found that people who watch "The Daily Show" are more informed than people who watch Fox News.
We can add John Oliver to that list
= new reply since forum marked as read
so a lot of his potential audience is shut out. 
Better than half is local tragedies. Car crashes, fires, murders... It's tragic, none of it increases my understanding of the world. Any political reporting is filtered through the "both sides of the aisle" media auto-template they must all share. Again, it doesn't increase anybody's *understanding*. The closest thing to investigative reporting I ever see anymore is the kind where they send reporters to badger some local who is getting screwed by some company or other. Which at least is fighting on the side of the people, but again it doesn't call out any larger patterns of events.
It's all presented as just a bunch of stuff that happened. Any context or dot-connecting is studiously avoided.
