AAfter White House-bound Bill Clinton donned shades and played the sax on The Arsenio Hall Show in June 1992, a small intellectual industry emerged to examine the relationship between entertainment and politics. Media watchdogs began counting jokes on Leno and Letterman to make sure Republicans and Democrats were evenly roasted, while campaign managers hurried to book their candidates for “humanizing” interviews on the laugh circuit. Whether any of this mattered to public opinion was unclear, until a Pew Research Center survey published in early 2000 found that young people received more political campaign information from late-night comedy than did older or better-informed people. Youngsters garnered less information from traditional news sources than did any other group. Academics and journalists alike were intrigued and often alarmed at these findings — more so after Pew’s 2004 follow-up found still fewer young people citing newspapers and network television as information sources and still more citing late-night comedy. Commentators leapt to the conclusion that young people were abandoning journalism for comedy to get political news.

That’s a little hasty, according to a new study by Dannagal Young and Russell Tisinger, doctoral candidates at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. Reanalyzing the Pew data in the summer issue of the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, they find that young people who turn to late-night comedy for political information watch more traditional national network news — not less — than peers who abstain from watching late-night comedy. One reason may be that satirical programs such as The Daily Show function like editorial cartoons in a newspaper; getting the jokes requires context and prior knowledge. The scholars say their data support two current notions about entertainment and politics: one, that comedy serves as a “‘gateway’ to consumption of traditional news,” and two, that “individuals...

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