Viewers of The Colbert Report do not all see the same show. Liberals see host Stephen Colbert as a liberal acting the part of intolerant blowhard. Conservatives, in contrast, identify with many of the attitudes Colbert affects and relish the ridicule he heaps on liberal nostrums and liberal guests. Both groups think The Colbert Report is funny. Both groups think Colbert is on their side.

So conclude Heather LaMarre, Kristen Landreville, and Michael Beam of Ohio State University, who showed video clips of Colbert to three hundred college students for their study “The Irony of Satire,” published in the April 2009 International Journal of Press/Politics. As the authors note, the findings mirror those of a study done thirty-five years ago of viewer responses to All in the Family, the most popular TV sitcom of the 1970s. In that study, Neil Vidmar and Milton Rokeach found that liberals considered Archie Bunker, the politically conservative protagonist, the racist and sexist goat of the show, his bluster blatantly ridiculous, whereas conservatives saw Archie as the hero of the show, giving voice to a shared morality.

We take issue with the authors’ statement that the power of political satire to influence opinion is more modest than one might imagine because “audience perceptions play a much stronger role than previously thought.” Previously thought by whom? The notion of “selective perception”—people seeing what they want to see—has been a hallowed touchstone in the literature of social psychology for decades.

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