The Daily Show with Jon Stewart uses humor to explore, analyze, and criticize current media and political trends, politicians, and campaigns. Reappropriation uses video as an argument against the original producers of that content, one of the tools used to highlight the problems with the political and current media coverage. The effectiveness of using reappropriated video is analyzed through a rhetorical analysis, combining argumentative analysis and functional analysis. Through this analysis a structure is developed for three types of arguments used by The Daily Show: highlighting absurdity, the political fact check and highlighting contradictions, and exposing social and media patterns. The analysis explores the strengths and weaknesses of each type of reappropriation, and the structural form of the argument.

The Daily Show är ett halvtimmeslångt amerikanskt humorprogram som sänds på kabelkanalen Comedy Central. Programmet tar upp nyheter, främst om politik, på ett humoristiskt sätt med hjälp av klipp från etablerade nyhetskanaler. Vår undersökning syftar till att ta reda på hur The Daily Show förändrats efter valet 2008 då Barack Obama valdes till president. Vi har jämfört inslagen i 32 The Daily Show-avsnitt från hösten 2005 med lika många från samma period 2009. Extra fokus har lagts på hur programmet behandlar nyhetsmedier. Dessutom har vi undersökt programmets gästlistor från hela dessa år, samt tagit hjälp av en tidigare studie från 2007 för att se vilken sorts gäster som får framträda och om det skett någon förändring. Vår studie visar att The Daily Show gått mot att kritisera och rikta satir mot nyhetsmedier som CNN och Fox News i större utsträckning än tidigare. Särskilt Fox News har fått en mycket större andel av programmets uppmärksamhet. Färre underhållare finns med som gäster, till förmån för fler politiska kommentatorer, journalister och författare. Programmet fokuserar till största del på sakfrågor och inte enskilda personer.

Shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, Saturday Night Live, and even South Park represent an underresearched subfield of discourse about political communication and persuasion. These shows manage to reach audiences not traditionally known for high levels of political engagement and draw them in with their comedic framework. This thesis investigates the impact of televised political satire on public perceptions of presidential candidates and campaign issues and the direct result these impacts may have on presidential elections. This thesis first gives some background in the types of communication and personalities of the front-men and women of these shows and then moves into a historical account of how the exigence for this recent explicit hybridization between comedy and news emerged. It then analyzes how these comedians view their own role within media and politics. It provides a thick account of the liberalizing force televised political satire has been for the American political climate so far, and where it will likely lead us in the near future with the growth of new communication technologies.

The goal of this paper is to create a framework through which the television programs The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park can be evaluated collectively. The framework of "serious play" permits the analysis of the relationship between the three programs, specifically regarding their comedic, political and religious functions. This textual analysis proposes that when examined together through serious play, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park are best visualized through a legal analogy which is supported by serious play.

This study analyzes 2008 presidential election coverage on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report to determine how they confront the tension between the genres of news and entertainment. To this point, much of the scholarly work on political entertainment news has focused on examining its effects on viewers' political attitudes and knowledge. A rhetorical analysis reveals the actual messages they convey and the strategies they employ to discuss contemporary American politics. Through comedic devices such as satire and parody, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report offer a venue for social commentary and criticisms of power at a time when traditional venues are dissipating, and these shows provide a place for serious political discourse that encourages dialogue that promotes civic engagement. / Master of Arts

This study explored social judgment theory’s utility in a political comedy context. As a model of attitude change, social judgment theory describes attitude changes that occur in receivers of persuasive messages. Given that the type of humor used in the political comedy context requires the audience to interpret the message, audience processing of the humor is thought to resemble the processing of persuasive messages. This study explored the assumptions of social judgment theory in both a political comedy and a traditional news context. In order to explore how satiric messages impact the attitude change process, clips of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart or CBS News programs were shown to participants.Participants reported their attitudes and ego involvement regarding taxes and the job market prior to and after viewing the clips, which allowed attitude change to be identified. In addition, measures of audience activity, including ego involvement and political participation, were collected to explore the interplay of audience activity in attitude change. This project offered some support of social judgment theory’s utility in a political comedy context and reinforced the active audience assumption. / Department of Communication Studies

En metastudie som använder sig av en specifikt anpassad tolkning av grounded theory för att undersöka The Daily Shows satiriska kritik och funktion, samt hur detta relaterar till det sociologiska perspektivet. Fynden visar på en problematik som väl överrensstämmer med mer allmänna sociologiska teorier hos Foucault, Bourdieu och Habermas. Satiren visar sig utöva en serie meningsfulla funktioner som har potential att verka som en populistisk samhällskritik med stort inflytande. Satiren visar sig dock inte vara en problemfri diskurs och ett antal problem identifieras som behöver adresseras för att diskursen ska kunna åberopa någon form av legitimitet. / A meta-study which uses a specifically tailored interpretation of grounded theory to explore The Daily Shows satiric critique and function, as well as how it relates to the sociological perspective. The findings show a complex of problems that well corresponds to the more general sociological theories of Foucault, Bourdieu and Habermas. The satire is found to perform a series of meaningful functions with potential to act as a populist form of social criticism with a large influence. However, satire is also found to be a problematic discourse and a series of problems are identified that needs to be addressed for the discourse to invoke any form of legitimacy.

In this paper, I consider the success of Jonathan Swift’s The Drapier’s Letters and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show in changing the political climate of the world around them. By analyzing the political background of America in the 2000s and the Irish reaction to William Woods’ patent in the 1720s, I prove the influence of Stewart and Swift’s satire. I then analyze the specific tactics each employs in order to achieve an audience and influence change, concluding by comparing the similar tactics that each use, including persona, irony, and humor as a veil of serious intent.

Thesis advisor: William Stanwood / The Daily Show with Jon Stewart's ascendance into the mainstream consciousness has reached a point where many not only consider it to be a source of news, but also Stewart to be one of the most respected and important journalists in the country. This study investigated The Daily Show’s impact on the general public using the theoretical framework of agenda-setting. After grounding the study in existing scholarly research, data, content and textual analyses were performed on 12 Daily Show episodes, as well as data analysis on the corresponding network news broadcasts. It was then concluded that The Daily Show has no significant impact on what people think about no matter what variables were analyzed. Thus, Stewart likely has been right all along in his claim that he and his team are not journalists – rather, they are merely producing a comedy show that happens to involve news and parodies news broadcasts. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: Communication Honors Program. / Discipline: Communication.

AbstractTitle: Political Bias in Entertainment (Politisk partiskhet i underhållning)Number of pages: 38Author: Andreas GawellTutor: Göran SvenssonCourse: Media and Communication Studies CPeriod: Fall 2009University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science,Uppsala University.Purpose/Aim: The purpose of this research paper was to investigate political bias in TheDaily Show before the presidential election 2008.Material/Method: With a quantitative content analyze based on variables connected withtheory from investigating bias in news, I am looking at 19 episodes of The Daily Showstarting one month before the presidential election 2008.Main results: The results of this research indicated a liberal bias in The Daily Show favoringthe Democratic Party. Both parties was made fun of and joked about, but the Republican Partyand its candidates was a lot more frequently laughed at then its Democratic equivalent. Alsolooking at the issues that came up in the show you can see Republicans getting to talk aboutissues not on their own agenda more frequently than Democrats.Keywords: The Daily Show, political bias, presidential election 2008, Republican Party,Democratic Party