No Joke: The Best News Strategy is at "The Daily Show"

There’s some interesting new evidence to buttress our argument that Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” has a superior content strategy underlying its successful business model — specifically, in terms of its news programming decisions.

In television and radio, and in certain types of online environments, the art and craft of programming has always been critical to success. Yet, outside the media industry, the programmer is far less familiar figure than is the producer.

Nevertheless, the decisions of which programs to broadcast when, in what order, and how they are juxtaposed, traditionally have had almost as much to do with ratings as does the content of those programs — although this, too, is now changing.

Over the past year alone, the broadcast television networks lost a whopping 13.6 percent (6 million) prime-time viewers, which of course reduced their advertising rates proportionately. Hidden behind those numbers, however, is the confusing data-point that there has been no fall-off in overall TV viewing at all!

What’s going on here? Call it the TiVo affect. In the digital age, savvy consumers have taken the programming function over for themselves, by taping and viewing their favorite shows whenever they want to, as opposed to when the linear-thinking advertisers would like them to.

This places new pressure on content execs to make the right news decisions, which brings me back to Comedy Central maestro Jon Stewart.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism studied the content of “The Daily Show” for an entire year (2007), compared its news agenda with that of the more traditional news media, in an attempt to place the program into some kind of media context.

Among the study’s findings:

• The program’s focus is on U.S. politics and foreign affairs, especially the war in Iraq. This governmental and political programming accounted for almost half (47 percent) of the time spent on the program. This proportion tracks closely with that of the “serious” cable news talk shows.
• “The Daily Show” presents more than twice as much coverage of the media industry (8 percent of its programming) than that in the mainstream press.
• A good deal of sensational news is ignored by “The Daily Show,” including tragedies such as the Minneapolis bridge collapse or the Virginia Tech shootings.

“In its choice of topics, its use of news footage to deconstruct the manipulations by public figures, and its tendency toward pointed satire over playing just for laughs, “The Daily Show” performs a function that is close to journalistic in nature—getting people to think critically about the public square,” states the report.

“In that sense, it is a variation of the tradition of Russell Baker, Art Hoppe, Art Buchwald, H.L. Mencken and other satirists who once graced the pages of American newspapers.”

Furthermore, the survey found that Stewart’s viewers are extremely well-informed, scoring in the highest percentile for their knowledge of current affairs.

In the end, the audience data tells the story best. “The Daily Show” now has an average audience of about 1.8 million. That’s 50 percent greater than CNN’s highest-rated (and most pretentious) news show, “Election Center,” which captures an average of only 1.2 million viewers.