When Americans last year were asked to name the journalist they most admired, a comedian showed up at No. 4 on the list. Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central and former master of ceremonies at Academy Award shows, tied in the rankings with anchormen Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and cable host Anderson Cooper. [1][Editor's note: To view the graphs, charts and video clips associated with this article, http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=309 [1]
2. Traditional news media consists of a list of 48 news outlets that are a part of PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index. Read the methodology.
3. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions: What Americans Know: 1989-2007.” April 15, 2007. Available at: http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=319 [2]
4. “Well-informed audiences come from cable (Daily Show/Colbert Report, O'Reilly Factor), the internet (especially major newspaper websites), broadcast TV (NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) and radio (NPR, Rush Limbaugh's program).”
5. Average total viewers, 2008 year to date. Viewership data provided by Comedy Central, April 29 2008
6. Source: Nielsen Media Research analysis at MediaBistro.com. Available at:
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/original/1Q [3]'08%20(LIVESD)%20FINAL%20P2%20Cable%20News%20Program%20Ranker.pdf
7. Once in a while guests appear for two separate segments: the second as well as the third. This is most frequently true for the most prominent figures, such as Presidential front-runners etc. Also, in one instance in 2007, a guest interview (with Ali Allawi on April 18) was aired as third and second to last story. A report on the falling stock market was the last story. Footnotes
1. Even though the stories about the debate over war policy in Iraq took place in Washington D.C., many of those segments were coded as “foreign affairs” because of their broad topic.
2. Bill Moyers’ Journal, PBS. April 27, 2007. Transcript available at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04272007/transcript1.html [4]