Mass Communication and Society, 16:586–607, 2013

Copyright # Mass Communication & Society Division

of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
ISSN: 1520-5436 print=1532-7825 online
DOI: 10.1080/15205436.2012.735742

Learning about Politics From The Daily

Show: The Role of Viewer Orientation
and Processing Motivations

Lauren Feldman
School of Communication
American University

Although late-night comedy and satirical news programs like The Daily Show
have been recognized as important sources of political information, prior
research suggests that viewers gain only a limited amount of political knowl-
edge from watching these programs. Drawing from uses and gratification
theory and extant research on political information processing, this study
examines whether learning from The Daily Show depends on whether viewers
orient to the message as news or as entertainment. Results from an online
experiment suggest that viewers who orient to a segment from The Daily Show
as news or as a mix of news and entertainment invest more mental effort and
subsequently learn more than viewers who have a purely entertainment orien-
tation. Further, among viewers with a purely entertainment orientation, pro-
viding them with an explicit informational-processing goal increases the
amount of mental effort and learning relative to viewers who are given no
explicit viewing objective.

In the last decade, late-night comedy and satirical news programs have
emerged as important sources of political information. The monologues
of late-night comedians, such as Jay Leno and David Letterman, often

Lauren Feldman (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2008) is an Assistant Professor in the

School of Communication at American University. Her research interests include political
communication and media effects.
Correspondence should be addressed to Lauren Feldman, School of Communication,
American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20016-8017. E-mail:
feldman@american.edu

586
 LEARNING FROM THE DAILY SHOW 587

target politicians (Niven, Lichter, & Amundson, 2003; Young, 2004), and
during campaign season, candidates frequently appear as guests on these
programs. The content of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon
Stewart is even more consistently political: Each episode offers a satiric
interpretation of politics and current events, in which host Jon Stewart
mocks those who both make and report the news. Indeed, in 2004, the
Pew Research Center found that nearly equal percentages of young people
report getting election information from late-night comedy as they do from
network news. As such, the blend of information and entertainment offered
on programs like The Daily Show, Late Show with David Letterman, and The
Tonight Show with Jay Leno has attracted attention as a strategy for engag-
ing young people and other hard-to-reach audiences in the political process
(Baum, 2005; Feldman & Young, 2008). But do audiences effectively learn
about politics and policy from humor and satire?
Although research has begun to demonstrate the influence of late-night
comedy in shaping audiences’ impressions of political actors (Moy, Xenos,
& Hess, 2006; Young, 2006), extant evidence suggests that it may play only a
limited role in conveying factual information about public affairs (e.g., Baek
& Wojcieszak, 2009; Johnson, Braima, & Sothirajah, 1999; Hollander, 1995,
2005; Prior, 2003; Weaver & Drew, 1995; Young, Tisinger, Kenski, &
Romer, 2006). It is not clear, however, whether the absence of a consistent
relationship between late-night comedy viewing and factual political
knowledge is a function of program content, audience characteristics, or
both. On one hand, it may be that typical late-night fare is too superficial
to communicate factual political information. The Daily Show, given that
it has been found to offer the same amount of substantive political coverage
as broadcast news programming (Fox, Koloen, & Sahin, 2007), may pose an
exception. In fact, research has shown that The Daily Show viewers are more
knowledgeable about politics than viewers of other types of late-night com-
edy (Young & Tisinger, 2006), as well as the general public (Pew Research
Center for the People and the Press, 2008); however, this knowledge appears
to precede—not follow—program exposure (Young et al., 2006). Nonethe-
less, recent experimental research suggests that when audience factors are
held constant, viewers do absorb some factual political content from The
Daily Show, though less than what is learned via a network news broadcast
(Kim & Vishak, 2008).
Another possible explanation for why political learning from comedy
programs like The Daily Show appears to be relatively limited involves view-
ers’ perceptions of and motivations toward different media genres. Viewers’
orientations toward late-night comedy as entertainment might hinder close
processing of its political content, whereas traditional news might be more
readily conceived as a political information source, thereby eliciting greater
588 FELDMAN

mental effort and subsequent learning. Thus, it may be that audiences do

not learn as much from late-night comedy and political satire—not because
of something inherent about the content of these programs, but because they
approach this content as entertainment rather than as serious political
information, and thus fail to deploy the cognitive resources necessary for
effectively processing and learning from media messages. Through an online
experiment, the present study examines whether the way in which people
orient toward the political comedy of The Daily Show (i.e., whether they
characterize it as news or as entertainment) influences the mental effort they
devote to such messages and, in turn, how much they learn. It further
investigates whether explicitly activating an informational-viewing motive
can increase close processing and learning from The Daily Show, parti-
cularly among those who characterize the show as entertainment. To my
knowledge, this is the first study to consider these relationships in the
context of political comedy and satire and, in so doing, it deepens our theor-
etical understanding of the processes via which political learning from
entertainment media occurs.

THE DAILY SHOW: NEWS OR ENTERTAINMENT?

Research suggests that viewers may indeed approach late-night comedy

and political satire differently than they do traditional news media.
Although young people cite late-night comedy programs as a political infor-
mation source, Prior (2003) demonstrated that viewers predominantly turn
to late-night comedy not for information but for entertainment. Further,
Holbert, Lambe, Dudo, and Carlton (2007) found that college students rate
The Daily Show significantly lower on a scale of political gratifications than
they do conventional news programs.
However, the question of how audiences orient themselves toward
programs like The Daily Show is part of a larger debate surrounding the dis-
solving boundaries between news and entertainment that are now evident
everywhere in contemporary media. Endemic to this debate is whether
late-night comedy and other talk shows that trade in politics—often dispar-
agingly referred to as ‘‘infotainment’’—are appropriately categorized as
news, as entertainment, or as a mix of the two. Baym (2005) argued that that
the blurred borders that have increasingly come to define today’s media
environment represent not so much a move toward infotainment as ‘‘a more
profound phenomenon of discursive integration, a way of speaking about,
understanding, and acting within the world defined by the permeability of
form and the fluidity of content’’ (p. 262). For Baym, The Daily Show is
the epitome of discursively integrated media, with its blend of information
 LEARNING FROM THE DAILY SHOW 589

and amusement, satire and keen commentary; here, the discourse of

entertainment and discourse of news are ‘‘placed not in binary opposition,
but in complementary arrangements’’ (p. 7). The Daily Show, then, does
not fit tidily into an ‘‘entertainment’’ or ‘‘news’’ box. Thus, although audi-
ences tuning in to Comedy Central to watch The Daily Show are more apt to
approach it as entertainment than they would a traditional television news
broadcast, The Daily Show likely inspires variation among individuals in
terms of how they react to, or orient toward its content, with some seeing
it as news, some as entertainment, and others a hybrid of the two. Of interest
to this study is whether such differences in orientation could have conse-
quences for how much viewers process and learn about politics from The
Daily Show content.

VIEWERS’ ORIENTATION TO THE DAILY SHOW AND ITS

CONSEQUENCES FOR LEARNING

Research on political comedy suggests that any distinction viewers make

between information and entertainment carries important implications for
information processing. For example, Young (2008) found that humorous
political messages were less likely to provoke counterarguing than nonhu-
morous messages and that this reduction in argument scrutiny was driven,
in part, by how audience members categorized the stimuli (as serious or
funny). Nabi, Moyer-Guse, and Byrne (2007) likewise found that perceived
humor in a comedic political message increased message discounting, in that
audiences were more likely to dismiss highly humorous content as irrelevant
or ‘‘just a joke’’ than less humorous content. This discounting was, in turn,
associated with decreased depth of message processing. Along similar lines,
Kim and Vishak (2008) found that viewers of The Daily Show and network
news engaged in different information processing patterns. Experimental
subjects randomly assigned to view The Daily Show tended to employ online
processing, forming their judgments on the fly using an affective tally,
whereas those assigned to view network news were more likely to use
memory-based processing, basing their judgments on information called
up from long-term memory. As an explanation for this finding, the authors
suggested that individuals’ processing strategies may have been instan-
taneously formed at the moment of exposure, based on preconceptions
about the two types of media content. Taken together, these studies indi-
cate that media content which viewers characterize as entertaining or
funny will not be processed in the same way as media content that is char-
acterized as more serious news or information. This supports the possibility
that it is viewers’ orientations toward media content—that is, whether they
590 FELDMAN

characterize it as entertainment or not—and not the medium per se that best

explains learning effects.
In another line of research, Salomon (1984; Salomon & Leigh, 1984) has
argued that culturally shared preconceptions about print and television
determine the amount of effortful processing children will devote to material
from each medium, irrespective of the amount of effort the material actually
warrants. Because television is perceived as highly familiar, overlearned, and
lifelike—and thus, requiring little mental effort—children devote fewer cog-
nitive resources to a televised story than to its comparable print version and
learn less from television as a result. Salomon (1984) introduced the concept
of amount of invested effort (AIME), ‘‘the number of nonautomatic mental
elaborations applied to a unit of material’’ (p. 648), as central to learning
from media. AIME, then, is a motivational construct that captures the con-
trolled, voluntary, and deliberate allocation of mental effort in processing a
given media stimulus and, in part, depends on preconceived expectations
about how much effort that stimulus warrants. AIME is conceptually simi-
lar to cognitive elaboration, or the process of connecting new information
from the media to past experiences and prior knowledge, which has been
found to be a significant determinant of learning from the news among
adults (Eveland, 2001).
Thus, it is possible to see how people’s assumptions regarding the amount
of effort required to effectively process entertainment and news, respect-
ively, can affect how much audiences learn from a political comedy program
like The Daily Show. Specifically, if audiences tend to characterize The
Daily Show—even when it communicates relevant political information—
predominantly as entertainment, they would be unlikely to engage in the
kind of effortful processing that produces political learning. This is because
entertainment is more likely to be discounted as unserious (Nabi et al., 2007)
and perceived as a familiar, ‘‘easy’’ medium that requires minimal proces-
sing effort. In contrast, if audiences orient toward political comedy as a
form of news and information, they would be more inclined to invest the
cognitive resources necessary to acquire public affairs knowledge. Indeed,
prior research suggests that different television genres mobilize variable
levels of audience activity. For example, Rubin (1984) found that comedy
and other types of entertainment programs were associated with ‘‘ritua-
lized,’’ or habitual, television viewing, whereas news programs were associa-
ted with ‘‘instrumental’’ viewing, characterized by the goal-directed use of
media to acquire information.
Emerging, then, from this existing body of research and theory is a
proposed sequence of relationships whereby viewers’ message orientation,
which is conceptualized here as a reaction to or perception of a media stimu-
lus, influences the effort an individual devotes to processing the stimulus,
 LEARNING FROM THE DAILY SHOW 591

which, in turn, influences learning. It is also expected that message

orientation will have an indirect effect on learning, via effortful processing.
These expectations, which are tested in the specific context of The Daily
Show, translate into the following hypotheses:

H1: Audiences who orient toward The Daily Show as news or as a mix
of news and entertainment will engage in more effortful message
processing than audiences who orient toward The Daily Show purely as
entertainment.
H2: Effortful message processing will increase learning from The Daily Show.
H3: Audiences’ news orientation toward The Daily Show will indirectly influ-
ence learning via effortful processing.

PROCESSING MOTIVATIONS AND LEARNING

In addition to viewers’ orientation to a message, audience motivation is a

related concept with significance for information processing and learning.
Motivations are the objectives people have in mind when they engage in a
particular behavior and are causes of goal-oriented activity (e.g., Atkinson,
1964). Thus, unlike viewer orientation to the media message, motivations
are expected to develop prior to media exposure. In the context of communi-
cation behavior, the uses and gratifications tradition has produced an exten-
sive body of research suggesting that the effects of media exposure largely
depend on the motivations individuals bring to the media use situation
(see Rubin, 2002, for a review). In other words, people actively seek out
media content to fulfill particular needs, and the varying reasons for which
individuals consume media bear on the effects of their media use, in part
because motivations help direct cognitive processing. In particular, use of
the news for surveillance or information purposes has been associated with
higher levels of knowledge and recall than when news is employed for diver-
sionary purposes (e.g., Gantz, 1978; Perse, 1990; Vincent & Basil, 1997).
Eveland’s (2001) cognitive mediation model further expands on the role
surveillance motivations play in learning from the news, demonstrating an
indirect effect via cognitive elaboration. Thus, audience motivations for
media use should influence both elaboration, or effortful processing, and
learning.
Moreover, news motivations, and their subsequent effects on infor-
mation processing and learning, appear amenable to external manipu-
lation. Experimental studies have shown that specifying particular
consumption goals can influence how individuals process and learn from
political news (Tewksbury, 1999). Specifically, Tewksbury found that,
592 FELDMAN

when asked to watch a television news profile of a political candidate,

individuals who were told to evaluate the candidate processed the
news more systematically and recalled more information about the candi-
date’s issues positions than those who were told to simply relax while
watching.
Further, in their research on children’s learning from print and television
media, Salomon and Leigh (1984) found that preconceptions about the rela-
tive effort required to process content from the two types of media can be
overcome by changing perceptions of the task—or manipulating audience
goals. Children expended greater effort and exhibited more learning when
told to watch television with a specific learning objective rather than just
for fun. On the other hand, such a manipulation had little effect on learning
from print, because, here, children readily mobilized their abilities regardless
of the task at hand.
This finding can be readily translated to the context of learning from
The Daily Show. Specifically, it suggests that by explicitly activating an
informational-viewing objective, the expenditure of mental effort and sub-
sequent learning from a comedic political message can be increased; how-
ever, this effect is likely to occur only among those who orient to the
program as entertainment. Following from H1 to H3, those who orient to
the program as news, or even as a mix of news and entertainment, will
deploy their cognitive resources regardless of an externally imposed
motive—similar to print readers in Salomon’s experiments. On the other
hand, audiences who orient to The Daily Show as entertainment—similar
to TV viewers in Salomon’s experiments—may need to be explicitly moti-
vated in order to invest the mental effort required for maximal learning.
Thus, an externally imposed informational-viewing motive is expected to
interact with viewers’ message orientation in its effects on effortful proces-
sing, such that it will have a stronger effect among those who orient to
The Daily Show as entertainment. This interaction is formally articulated
in the following hypothesis:

H4: An explicit informational-viewing objective will increase effortful

processing relative to people who are given no explicit motive or a motive
to process the message as entertainment; however, this effect will mani-
fest only among those who orient to The Daily Show as entertainment
and not those who orient to The Daily Show as news or as a mix of news
and entertainment.

It is further expected that that the effect of the informational viewing

objective will trigger an indirect effect on learning, via effortful processing;
however, again, this is expected to manifest only among those with an
 LEARNING FROM THE DAILY SHOW 593

entertainment orientation to The Daily Show. This is suggestive of

moderated mediation:

H5: An explicit information-viewing objective will indirectly increase learning,

via effortful processing, relative to no objective or an entertainment viewing
objective; however, this mediating effect will manifest only among those
who orient to The Daily Show as entertainment and not those who orient to
The Daily Show as news or as a mix of news and entertainment.

METHOD

An online experiment was fielded in April 2010. The experiment consisted of

a 3 (viewing objective: informational, entertainment, no objective)
2 (topic:
Biden visit to Israel, Obama’s policy agenda) between-subjects design. Part-
icipants were e-mailed a link to an online survey, hosted by surveygizmo.
com. Random assignment to viewing objective and news topic occurred
automatically when subjects linked to the survey. Participants completed
several baseline measures, including political interest, exposure to news and
various entertainment programs, political ideology, and demographics. Part-
icipants were then shown one of two segments from The Daily Show, follow-
ing which they completed a posttest with message orientation, information
processing, learning, and other message evaluation measures. Just prior to
viewing the clip, participants were given the following instructions, which
randomly varied according to the assigned viewing objective: ‘‘You are about
to watch a short clip from a recent television comedy [news and public affairs]
program. We are mostly interested in how entertaining [informative] you
think the program is.’’ Subjects assigned to the no viewing objective con-
dition were simply told that they were ‘‘about to watch a short clip from a
recent television program,’’ with no explicit viewing motive activated.

Sample
A sample of 387 adults was recruited from Survey Sampling International’s (SSI)
online panel of survey respondents.1 According to SSI (2007), its panel of
approximately 1.7 million Americans represents 70% of the adult online popu-
lation. The sample was restricted to respondents between the ages of 18 and

1
A total of 480 respondents initially completed the study. However, 42 were eliminated from
the final sample because they straight-lined the survey (n ¼ 21) or completed the survey in an
unreasonably short time, that is, less than 15 minutes (n ¼ 21). A quality control measure
immediately following the video stimulus asked respondents if they were able to see and hear
the video; respondents who reported that they had been unable to do either were removed from
the study sample (n ¼ 51).
594 FELDMAN

49, because approximately two thirds of The Daily Show audience fall into this
age group (Nymag.com, 2008). The average age of study participants was 39.6
(SD ¼ 10.1). The sample was 72% female and 81% White. Median education
level was ‘‘some college,’’ and 26% of subjects had a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Stimuli
Respondents were randomly exposed to one of two segments from The Daily
Show. The segments were purposively selected based on several criteria: First,
both contained substantive factual information about politics, and the num-
ber of discrete facts was roughly equivalent across segments. Second, the seg-
ments were not explicitly partisan or ideological in tone so that respondents
were not predisposed to engage in selective attention and=or recall.2 Finally,
the segments were excerpted from Jon Stewart’s monologue and thus did not
feature interviews or correspondent reports. The first segment (‘‘The Path
from Peace’’) originally aired on March 11, 2010, and focused on Vice Presi-
dent Biden’s trip to Israel to broker peace talks between Israel and Palestine.
During Biden’s visit, Israel announced plans to build 1,600 additional settle-
ments in East Jerusalem, thereby derailing the peace process. The second seg-
ment (‘‘Tenacious O’’) originally aired on March 31, 2010 and focused on
President Obama’s busy agenda following the passage of the health care
reform bill, including announcements of an arms control agreement with
Russia and plans to expand offshore oil and gas exploration, the use of recess
appointments to bypass Senate confirmation hearings, and a visit to Afgha-
nistan. The segments were directly embedded into the online survey using
links from The Daily Show website. ‘‘Tenacious O’’ was 4:40 minutes long;
‘‘The Path from Peace’’ was 2:47 minutes long.3

2
For example, Jon Stewart often vocally criticizes partisan actors and organizations (e.g.,
Fox News) and, at times, invokes partisanship or ideology as the basis for his critique. The seg-
ments selected for this study avoided such content. Despite these efforts, a posttest item revealed
that 37% of respondents agreed somewhat or strongly that the segment they viewed was biased,
and this correlated weakly with conservative ideology (r ¼ .116, p < .05). Mean perceptions of
bias were distributed equally across topics and viewing objectives. Still, to account for the
potential influence of perceived bias, the analyses presented in Table 1 were also run with per-
ceived bias included as an additional control variable. Perceived bias was not significantly
related to any of the dependent variables and in no case did its inclusion as a covariate change
the patterns of significance presented in Table 1.
3
Although it is not ideal that the two segments differed in length, it was difficult to identify
two segments of equal length that met the criteria discussed previously and that were also not
longer than approximately 5 minutes, so not to place undue burden on respondents. Thus, the
unequal segment length is a consequence of relying on naturally occurring media content, which
was thought to be critical for establishing external validity. Given that there were no hypotheses
related to the differences between segments, this seemed an acceptable trade-off.
 LEARNING FROM THE DAILY SHOW 595

Processing and Learning Measures

Orientation to the message. Participants were asked ‘‘how would you

best characterize the video you just watched?’’ Response options included
‘‘as news,’’ ‘‘as entertainment,’’ or ‘‘as a mixture of news and entertain-
ment.’’ Because of the low percentage of respondents who classified the
video as exclusively news, a dichotomous variable was computed, distin-
guishing between those who characterized the video as entertainment
(27.4%), and those who saw it either as news (2.6%) or as a mixture of news
and entertainment (70%).4

Effortful processing. This measure was comprised of two items adapted

from Salomon’s (1984; Salomon & Leigh, 1984) measure of AIME. Subjects
were asked, ‘‘How much mental effort did you devote to watching the
video?’’ and ‘‘How much did you concentrate on the video?’’ For both
questions, responses were registered on a 5-point scale, and options included
(a) ‘‘none,’’ (b) ‘‘very little,’’ (c) ‘‘some,’’ (d) ‘‘quite a bit,’’ and (e) ‘‘a great
deal.’’ Responses to the two items were averaged together (r ¼ .61).5

Learning. To measure learning, subjects completed both a free recall task

and a multiple-choice knowledge test. For the free recall task, subjects were
instructed to write down everything they could remember from the video,
including facts, images, or other items. Two graduate students independently
coded the responses by awarding 1 point for each discrete recall item, based
on standard subject=verb units. Points were not credited for incorrect infor-
mation, vague or nonspecific responses, or respondents’ personal opinions. A
count of the valid recall items provided the dependent measure of free recall.

4
Arguably, orientation to the message could have been measured prior to the viewing con-
dition manipulation (i.e., on the pretest), so that it remained uncontaminated by the manipu-
lation. However, doing so would necessarily exclude respondents who aren’t familiar with
The Daily Show and would also fail to allow for the possibility that the nature and content
of a given episode, as well as the viewing context, may influence viewers’ orientation to the
message. Particularly given the hybrid nature of The Daily Show (Baym, 2005), it was important
to allow for such possible situational variations in orientation. Indeed, as conceptualized in the
literature review, viewer orientation is a reaction to message content. Thus, message orientation
was measured immediately following exposure to The Daily Show segment. Subsequent analyses
showed that the viewing objective manipulation had no main effect on message orientation.
5
Salomon’s (1984) measure of AIME also included questions about peers’ effort, which was
not appropriate for the present study, and how easy the stimulus was to understand. Although a
question pertaining to the latter was also included in this study, it only weakly correlated with
the effort and concentrate items (r ¼ .17 and .28, respectively) and was thus excluded from the
final measure of effortful processing.
596 FELDMAN

To verify reliability, a random subset of 80 responses was coded by both

coders. Intercoder reliability, calculated using Krippendorff’s alpha for
ratio-level data (Hayes & Krippendorff, 2007), was .96.
The knowledge test, which participants completed after the free recall
task, consisted of four multiple-choice questions tapping factual infor-
mation that was explicitly stated in the video stimulus to which participants
were exposed. Participants who saw the Biden video were asked which U.S.
official recently visited Israel (Biden), how many settlements Israel anno-
unced they would build in East Jerusalem (1,600), what Palestinians had
announced prior to Israel’s announcement to expand settlements in Jerusa-
lem (an agreement to enter into indirect peace talks), and who is the current
Prime Minister of Israel (Benjamin Netanyahu). Participants who saw the
Obama video were asked approximately how long it took to negotiate
and pass the health care reform bill (14 months), with which country the
United States recently entered into an arms control agreement (Russia),
what country President Obama visited just days after signing the health care
reform bill (Afghanistan), and with which of several policies President
Obama recently announced intentions to move forward (expanded offshore
gas and oil exploration). Correct responses to each set of questions were
summed to form an index (Biden a ¼ .53, Obama a ¼ .61). Regardless of
which video subjects saw, their score on the corresponding knowledge test
served as the dependent measure of factual knowledge.

Control Measures

Frequency of The Daily Show viewing. Using a response scale from 1

(never) to 4 (often), participants were asked how frequently they watch
The Daily Show (M ¼ 1.7, SD ¼ .96).

Political ideology. Participants were asked to indicate their ideological

leanings, on a 5-point continuum including very conservative (8.8%), con-
servative (16.5%), moderate (51.4%), liberal (14.5%), and very liberal
(8.8%; M ¼ 3.0, SD ¼ 1.0).

Political interest. Political interest was measured using three items. The
first asked participants to indicate how much they follow what is going on in
government and public affairs. Response options ranged from 1 (hardly at
all) to 4 (most of the time). The other two items asked respondents how
much attention they pay to news about national politics and international
affairs, respectively, with response options registered on a 5-point scale
ranging from 1 (none) to 5 (a great deal). Responses to these three items were
 LEARNING FROM THE DAILY SHOW 597

summed to form an index, which ranged from 3 to 14 (a ¼ .87, M ¼ 8.8,

SD ¼ 2.9).

RESULTS

Prior to testing the hypotheses, a preliminary analysis was conducted to

estimate the magnitude of factual knowledge gain from the two Daily Show
segments. Subjects assigned to view the Obama topic served as a control
group for those assigned to the Biden topic, and vice versa. An independent
samples t test was used to compare mean scores on the four-item knowledge
test pertaining to the Obama segment among those who were assigned to the
Obama topic and those assigned to the Biden topic. The same was done for
the four-item knowledge test pertaining to the Biden segment. The mean
knowledge score for the Obama items was 2.99 (SD ¼ 1.2) among those
who watched the Obama segment and 1.79 (SD ¼ 1.3) among those who
watched the Biden segment. Thus, on average, viewers improved their
knowledge scores by 1.2 items as a result of watching the Obama segment,
t(385) ¼ 9.59, p < .001. For the Biden knowledge items, the mean knowledge
score among those who watched the Biden segment was 2.18 (SD ¼ 1.1) and
0.58 (SD ¼ .84) among those who watched the Obama segment. In this case,
viewers improved their knowledge scores by an average of 1.6 items as a
result of watching the Biden segment, t(385) ¼ 15.67, p < .001. This estab-
lishes that significant factual learning did take place as a result of exposure
to The Daily Show.
Hypothesis testing then proceeded in several stages. First, to test H1 and
H2, bivariate relationships between message orientation and effortful
processing and between effortful processing and learning were examined.
The indirect effect of message orientation on learning via effortful proces-
sing (H3) was tested using the bootstrapping method recommended by
Preacher and Hayes (2008), employing the SPSS ‘‘INDIRECT’’ macro they
developed for this purpose. For these analyses, results were pooled across
topics and viewing conditions. Next, a set of regressions was conducted
to ensure that the hypothesized relationships withstood controls for topic,
viewing objective, demographics, and political background variables.
Finally, the interactive effect of message orientation and viewing objec-
tive on effortful processing (H4) was tested using analysis of covariance
(ANCOVA) and multiple regression.6 Moderated mediation (H5) was tested

6
The main effects of viewing objective on message orientation, effortful processing,
and learning were also examined, and none were statistically significant. Because message
orientation was formed independently of viewing objective, it was appropriate to examine
whether these two variables interact in their influence on effortful processing.
598 FELDMAN

using the bootstrapping procedure recommended by Preacher, Rucker, and

Hayes (2007), employing their ‘‘MODMED’’ SPSS macro.
Consistent with H1, mean effortful processing was significantly lower
among those with a purely entertainment orientation (M ¼ 2.92, SD ¼ .98)
than among those who oriented to the message as news or as a mix of news
and entertainment (M ¼ 3.39, SD ¼ .86), t(385) ¼ 4.6, p < .001. In turn,
effortful processing was significantly correlated with factual knowledge,
r(387) ¼ .118, p < .05, and free recall, r(387) ¼ .192, p < .001. This supports
H2, although the correlations are small. The indirect effect of orientation
on factual knowledge via effortful processing was .078 (SE ¼ .04), with a
bootstrap bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa; 5,000 bootstrap samples)
95% confidence interval of 0.0189 to 0.1707, indicating that the effect was
significantly different from zero at p < .05. The indirect effect of orientation
on free recall via effortful processing was .197 (SE ¼ .07), with a bootstrap
BCa 99% confidence interval of 0.0558 to 0.4369, indicating a significant
mediating effect at p < .01. There was no significant direct effect of orien-
tation on either form of learning. Thus, consistent with H3, we see that
orienting to The Daily Show as news or as a mix of news and entertainment
indirectly improves learning relative to a purely entertainment orientation
by increasing the mental effort devoted to the message.
H1 through H3 were subjected to more rigorous testing, controlling for
message topic, viewing condition, and demographic and other background
factors. These variables were also used to predict message orientation.
The results, presented in Table 1, indicate that support for the hypotheses
withstands numerous controls. Of note, in the regression model for effortful
processing, orientation emerged as the strongest predictor (b ¼ .21,
p < .001). Effortful processing was, in turn, the most powerful predictor in
the free recall model (b ¼ .16, p < .001). Only the effect of effortful proces-
sing on factual knowledge (H2) was reduced to marginal significance in
the multivariate model (b ¼ .10, p ¼ .06; power ¼.55).7 Finally, orientation
to The Daily Show as news or a mix of news and entertainment, as opposed
to as purely entertainment, was more likely in the Biden topic condition,
among frequent The Daily Show viewers, and among liberals. Thus, orien-
tation is a function of both audience and message characteristics.
The analysis next considered whether the effect of the externally imposed
viewing objective on effortful processing was conditional on message orien-
tation and specifically whether the informational viewing motive increased
effortful processing only among those who characterized the message purely

7
Power was computed using the observed sample effect size (f 2 ¼ .008) as the basis of the
population effect and assuming an alpha of .05.
 TABLE 1
Effects of Viewing Condition, Topic, and Control Variables on Processing and Learning Outcomes

Message orientationa Effortful processingb Factual knowledgeb Free recallb

B (SE) b B (SE) b B (SE) b B (SE) b

Topic (Biden) 0.59 (.24) 1.81 0.06 (.09) 0.03 0.83 (.12) 0.34 0.09 (.21) 0.02
Viewing objective
Informational 0.14 (.30) 1.15 0.10 (.11) 0.05 0.02 (.15) 0.01 0.25 (.26) 0.06
Entertainment 0.11 (.31) 1.12 0.12 (.11) 0.06 0.18 (.15) 0.07 0.23 (.26) 0.05
Demographics
Age 0.02 (.01) 0.98 0.01 (.01) 0.07 0.01 (.01) 0.08 0.01 (.01) 0.05
y
Gender (female) 0.07 (.27) 0.94 0.07 (.10) 0.04 0.32 (.13) –0.12 0.45 (.23) 0.10
Education 0.01 (.08) 0.99 0.07 (.03) 0.13 0.08 (.04) 0.10 0.11 (.07) 0.08
y
Race (White) 0.22 (.31) 1.24 0.06 (.11) 0.03 0.24 (.15) 0.08 0.51 (.26) 0.10
Political ideology (liberal) 0.45 (.13) 1.56 0.07 (.05) 0.07 0.07 (.06) 0.06 0.30 (.11) 0.15
Frequency of Daily Show 0.32 (.15) 1.38 0.16 (.05) 0.17 0.10 (.07) 0.08 0.01 (.12) 0.002
y
Political interest 0.03 (.04) 0.97 0.06 (.02) 0.20 0.05 (.02) 0.11 0.07 (.04) 0.09
Processing variables
Orientation (news=mix) before — — 0.43 (.10) 0.21 0.13 (.13) 0.05 0.20 (.24) 0.04
effortful processing entered
Orientation (news=mix) after — — — — 0.08 (.14) 0.03 0.04 (.24) 0.01
effortful processing entered
y
Effortful processing — — — — 0.13 (.07) 0.10 0.36 (.12) 0.16
Indirect effect of orientation — — — — 0.055 (.03) 0.16 (.06)
via effortful processing [.0042, .1294]c [.0286, .3910]d
y
Constant 0.27 (.91) 0.76 1.95 (.32) 1.38 (.45) –1.53 (.80)
R2 0.12 0.15 0.19 0.10

Note. N ¼ 387.
a
Parameter estimates were obtained using logistic regression. Nagelkerke R2is reported. bParameter estimates were obtained using ordinary least
squares regression. cBias corrected and accelerated 95% confidence interval (CI); 5,000 bootstrap samples. dBias corrected and accelerated 99% CI;
5,000 bootstrap samples.
y

599

p < .05.  p < .01.  p < .001. p < .10.
 FIGURE 1 Effortful processing by viewing objective and message orientation.
Note. Adjusted means from an analysis of covariance.

as entertainment (H4). This was first tested using ANCOVA, with political
interest as the covariate.8 Particularly when the covariate is strongly related to
the dependent variable—as political interest and effortful processing
are here—ANCOVA is useful in experimental settings as a way to increase
power by removing variability from the error term (Keppel & Wickens,
2004). Results revealed a significant interaction between viewing condi-
tion and message orientation in predicting effortful processing, F(2, 379) ¼
3.99, p < .05, g2 ¼ .02. As can be seen in Figure 1, which plots the adjusted
means from this analysis, there was no effect of viewing condition on
effortful processing among people who characterized the message as news
or as a mix of news and entertainment, F(2, 379) ¼ .35, p ¼ .70; however,
among those who characterized the message purely as entertainment, there
were significant differences across viewing conditions, F(2, 379) ¼ 4.01,
p < .05. Specifically, subjects in the informational viewing condition engaged
in more effortful processing than those in the entertainment condition (p < .05
using the Sidak adjustment for multiple comparisons). This supports H4.
When subjected to multiple controls in a regression model, with dummy
variables used to indicate the informational and entertainment viewing
conditions, the interactions between both viewing objectives and message
orientation were significant, p < .05 (see Table 2). A test of simple slopes

8
News topic was also controlled by including it as a third factor in the ANCOVA.

600
 LEARNING FROM THE DAILY SHOW 601

TABLE 2
Ordinary Least Squares Regression Results of Interaction between Viewing Objective
and Message Orientation in Predicting Effortful Processing

B(SE) b

Topic (Biden) 0.05 (.09) 0.03

Viewing objective
Informational 0.63 (.21) 0.33
Entertainment 0.50 (.21) 0.26
Demographics
Age 0.01 (.01) 0.08
Gender (Female) 0.07 (.10) 0.03
Education 0.07 (.03) 0.12
Race (White) 0.07 (.11) 0.03
Political ideology (liberal) 0.08 (.05) 0.08
Frequency of Daily Show 0.17 (.05) 0.18
Political interest 0.07 (.02) 0.21
Processing variables
Orientation (news=mix) 0.87 (.19) 0.19
Interactions
Info
Orientation 0.51 (.25) 0.25
Ent
Orientation 0.73 (.25) 0.35
Constant 1.49 (.36)
R2 0.17a
N 387
a
R2 change is significant, p < .05, relative to Effortful Processing model in Table 1.

p < .05.  p < .01.  p < .001.

(Preacher, Curran, & Bauer, 2006) indicated a positive effect on effortful

processing of both the information (p < .01) and entertainment objectives
(p < .05) relative to no objective, among those who oriented to The Daily
Show as purely entertainment. Again, there were no differences in effortful
processing across conditions among those who oriented to The Daily Show
as news or as a mix of news and entertainment.
Finally, moderated mediation—that is, whether the indirect effect of
viewing objective on learning via effortful processing was moderated by
message orientation—was tested, following Preacher et al. (2007). Results
again confirmed a significant interaction between the information-viewing
condition (relative to the no objective condition) and orientation in predict-
ing effortful processing (B ¼ 0.46, SE ¼ .20, p < .05). Consistent with H5,
estimates of the conditional indirect effects for the two possible values of
orientation revealed a significant indirect effect of information motive on
both factual knowledge and free recall via effortful processing among
subjects who oriented to The Daily Show as purely entertainment but
not among those who oriented to it as news or as a mix of news and
602 FELDMAN

TABLE 3
Moderated Mediation Results

Factual knowledge Free recall

Point estimate Point estimate

(SE) BCa 95% CIa (SE) BCa 95% CIa

Indirect effect of info objective

relative to no objective via
effortful processing
News or mix orientation .004 (.02) .0458, .0217 .016 (.05) .1254, .0777
Entertainment orientation .048 (.03) .0007, .1484 .168 (.09) .0241, .3986
Indirect effect of entertainment
objective relative to no
objective via effortful
processing
News or mix orientation .008 (.02) .0134, .0535 .030 (.05) .0593, .1400
Entertainment .012 (.03) .0270, .0978 .043 (.09) .1274, .2243
Indirect effect of info objective
relative to entertainment
objective via effortful
processing
News or mix orientation .014 (.02) .0630, .0068 .049 (.05) .1612, .0363
Entertainment orientation .038 (.03) .0018, .1367 .135 (.09) .0141, .3518

Note. Analyses control for topic, political interest, and for the viewing objective condition not
included in the tested interaction. Estimates in bold type are significant at p < .05.
a
Bias-corrected and accelerated 95% confidence intervals (CIs); 5,000 bootstrap samples.

entertainment (see Table 3). The interactions between processing orientation

and the other viewing objective conditions were not significant.

DISCUSSION

The purpose of this study was to test whether the way in which audiences
orient to, or characterize, The Daily Show upon viewing (i.e., as news or
entertainment) influences the mental effort they devote to message proces-
sing and, in turn, how much they learn. The results suggest that viewers
who orient to The Daily Show as news, or as a mix of news and entertain-
ment, activate greater mental resources than those who orient to The Daily
Show as purely entertainment. This effortful processing, in turn, mediates a
positive effect of message orientation on learning. Of further interest was
whether those who orient to The Daily Show as entertainment could be
motivated to expend more mental effort, and consequently learn more, if
given an explicit informational-viewing objective. Results confirmed that
 LEARNING FROM THE DAILY SHOW 603

among those who orient to The Daily Show as entertainment, an external

informational viewing motive increases effortful processing relative to those
who viewed with no explicit motive. This translated into an indirect effect of
the informational motive on learning via effortful processing, but, again,
only among those with an entertainment orientation. This is ostensibly
because those who reflexively orient to The Daily Show as news, or as a
mix of news and entertainment, mobilize cognitive resources even in the
absence of an explicit informational viewing objective.
Although these results have important implications for our understand-
ing of how people process and learn from political comedy and satire, there
are some limitations to this study that should be kept in mind. The first limi-
tation involves the study sample, which was not necessarily representative of
the U.S. population or of The Daily Show audience; in particular, the sample
was disproportionately female. However, frequency of The Daily Show
viewing was controlled for in the analyses, and there were no meaningful
interactions detected involving this variable. Nonetheless, we must be cau-
tious in generalizing the results beyond the study participants. Likewise,
although the reported results were averaged across two different topical
messages, it is not clear that the findings would generalize to other messages
or political comedy programs beyond The Daily Show. An additional limi-
tation involves the ability to infer causality in the tested relationships. The
cross-sectional nature of variable measurement prohibits firm conclusions
regarding the direction of influence flowing from message orientation to
effortful processing to learning. For example, it is possible that perceptions
of learning and effortful processing led participants to characterize The
Daily Show as news rather than the other way around. Also, although the
regression analyses controlled for variables such as political interest, ideol-
ogy, frequency of The Daily Show viewing, and demographics, there may
be additional confounding factors that were not measured in this study.
Further, the study relied on a single item to measure message orientation
and just two items to measure effortful processing, which may not fully cap-
ture the complexity of these concepts. Finally, it is important to recognize
that this study focuses on just one process of learning from political enter-
tainment: effortful, short-term information acquisition. Political ‘‘learning’’
from entertainment can also occur in other ways, such as through incidental
exposure (Baum, 2003), longer term sleeper effects (Nabi et al., 2007),
agenda setting and priming (Moy et al., 2006; Parkin, 2010), ‘‘gateway’’
effects on attention (Baum, 2003; Feldman & Young, 2008), and ‘‘online’’
processing (Kim & Vishak, 2008). Still, this study’s focus on factual knowl-
edge gain serves as a useful indicator of the normative impact of The Daily
Show, consistent with Delli Carpini and Keeter’s (1996) assessment of this
type of knowledge as central to democratic citizenship.
604 FELDMAN

Despite these limitations, the findings help to illuminate the information

processes involved in learning from The Daily Show. Specifically, the results
suggest that viewers’ message orientation and motivation play an important
role in learning political information and begin to shed light on why prior
studies of learning from The Daily Show and other political comedy pro-
grams have demonstrated relatively limited effects. If audiences orient to
political comedy purely as entertainment, they do not deploy the mental
effort necessary for acquiring new political knowledge; thus, moving for-
ward, it will be important to account for message orientation in studies of
learning from hybrid news-entertainment media. Although this study found
that frequent viewers of The Daily Show were less likely to characterize the
stimulus as purely entertainment than infrequent or nonviewers, a purely
entertainment orientation was exhibited by 13% of ‘‘regular’’ The Daily
Show viewers and 20% of those who ‘‘sometimes’’ watch. With other, less
manifestly political programs, like The Tonight Show or the Late Show with
David Letterman, the tendency to approach political comedy as entertain-
ment is likely even higher, suggesting that effortful processing and learning
would be more significantly compromised. Future studies should explore
how message orientation and viewing objectives influence learning from
these other types of programs. Moreover, to further clarify some of the
premises underlying this study’s hypotheses, it would be valuable for future
research to examine whether viewers are, in fact, more naturally oriented
toward traditional news as information and thus more likely to expend cog-
nitive effort in its processing than with political comedy, as well as how the
delivery of political information interacts with motivation to affect mental
effort and learning. Finally, in an effort toward further theory building,
future research should attempt to pinpoint the precise mechanisms via
which message orientation affects effortful processing and learning, whether
due to message discounting (Nabi et al., 2007), ritualized viewing (Rubin,
1984), or something else.
From a practical perspective, the results of this study suggest ways
to maximize learning from entertainment-oriented political information
sources, that is, by changing people’s perceptions of the task or activating an
informational goal. For example, if—as the present results suggest—
audiences’ preconceptions regarding the amount of mental effort required
by news versus entertainment lead them to engage in differential infor-
mation-processing strategies, educators or journalists could do more to
emphasize the informational value of political comedy. Consequently, view-
ers might begin to change their expectations regarding how much mental
effort they should deploy when viewing. Political candidates themselves,
when appearing on entertainment talk shows, could begin their interviews
by telling the host and audience that the reason they’re appearing on the
 LEARNING FROM THE DAILY SHOW 605

program is to impart important information about their campaign platform.

Of course, explicitly cueing audiences to the informational potential of
political comedy could undermine some of the allure of these programs
and interfere with their perceived entertainment value, particularly among
viewers who lack intrinsic political interest. Future research should
experiment with how to change people’s orientations to political humor
without diminishing attention and enjoyment.
At the same time, some may caution against using entertainment sources
to obtain political information (e.g., Hart, 1999), particularly in light of
research that finds entertainment hosts tend to be less critical of politicians
(Baum, 2005). However, a strong argument can also be made for political
entertainment’s contributions to political discourse and its ability to forge
connections between ordinary citizens and the polity (e.g., Baym, 2005;
Jones, 2009; Van Zoonen, 2005). In any event, encouraging the audience
to treat entertainment similarly to news does not advocate for uncritically
accepting entertainment as a veridical representation of political reality.
Rather, it is to say that both political entertainment and traditional news
would benefit from close processing and scrutiny and, in fact, according
to Williams and Delli Carpini (2011), both types of media should be held
to similar standards of democratic accountability.
In conclusion, the role of media orientations and audience motivations is
of increasing importance in our digital information environment, given the
fluidity between media genres and the convergence of media outlets. As the
current findings demonstrate, the effects of political communication are not
necessarily an attribute of the media themselves but rather a function of
what expectations, cultural understandings, and objectives an individual
brings to these media. Moreover, the boundaries between categories of
media are flexible and permeable given the orientations of the individual
audience member. This research highlights the continued relevance of uses
and gratifications theory and underscores the need to better connect motiva-
tions and expectations for media exposure to the outcomes of that exposure.
It is hoped that this study will serve as a call for future research in that vein.

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