The New York Times
Monday, April 16th, 2007
The Story
The Summary: People who watch fake news are more informed than people who don't.
I like to laugh when I watch TV. As much as I want to be informed, I'd like to be entertained. If I just wanted to be informed, I'd read a newspaper. That being said, I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report regularly, and before I had cable... I'd get a lot of my news from Weekend Update. (I was a champion at the Current Events game we played at my elementary/high school.)
Fake news really isn't that fake. The news is real... they report on real stories, they just have a biased and humorous.
I think the people drawn to these shows have a genuine desire to be informed of recent events, but the choose to go outside the mainstream news sources to get it.
The six news sources cited most often by people who knew the most about current events were: “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” (counted as one), tied with Web sites of major newspapers; next came “News Hour With Jim Lehrer”; then “The O’Reilly Factor,” which was tied with National Public Radio; and Rush Limbaugh’s radio program.
This is the age-old Mass Communication Senior thesis topic. (okay... maybe not age old... but for about the last 10 years?) Every class there's someone who takes the easy way out and decides to do their research on where college students get their news from. (They choose college students because there's a large amount of them readily available, and most professors are willing to give up 5 minutes of class time to allow you to do a survey for academic research) It's nice to see that "fake news" not only rules us academics but those out in the "real world" as well.
There is legitimate news value in The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It's not made-up news, like The Onion, but a satirical take on the real news. You learn things from it. In fact, you can learn things that you can't from other news programs. (Like the fact that President Bush has used certain phrases, such as "stay the course", repeatedly over the course of his presidency.)
So, here's to "fake" news... because it's not really fake, it's based in truth, and spun to make us laugh.
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