"
Jon Stewart's Saturday afternoon "Rally to Restore Sanity" (merged with partner-in-satire
Stephen Colbert's concurrent "March to Keep Fear Alive") may become the largest "nonpartisan" event to hit the national Mall since . . . well, since a couple of months ago, when another basic-cable TV star, Glenn Beck, hosted his "Restoring Honor" rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Beck claimed his event was nonpartisan, too.
With less than a week to go, it's still not exactly clear how Stewart will be using this new platform. No guests or musical acts have been announced, Stewart has done only a couple media interviews, and he's offered few details about the rally on his nightly program.
"He is mobilizing people like Glenn Beck does, but I suspect his cultural influence surpasses Beck's," says Geoffrey Baym, a media studies professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, who wrote one of the first scholarly studies of "The Daily Show" in 2005.
"[Beck] has a narrow but very committed audience whereas Stewart resonates much wider with people who are fed up with the polemical aspects" of national affairs.
"He's reaching a watershed moment."
Whether watching "The Daily Show" makes you smarter has been an emerging question among academics, who seem as much in love with "The Daily Show" as journalists. But Lauren Feldman, an assistant professor at American University, suggests in a forthcoming collection of academic research about Stewart and Colbert that
Stewart's program has raised viewer awareness of science and environmental issues.
"In most cases, people are already bringing some knowledge to the show," Feldman says, echoing comments Stewart has made.
"You need some background knowledge to [get the satire]. I would say that the people who are watching are broadly interested in politics but are not necessarily well-versed in its nuances."
Some research backs this up.
Another survey, this one from 2007, classified 54 percent of the "Daily Show" audience as "high-knowledge" viewers, based on a current-events test. This
equaled the percentage of those who were
readers of major newspaper Web sites and
slightly exceeded viewers of "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" on PBS, "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox or NPR's regular listeners."
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