Connecting the Comedy Dots: Interview Content, Elaborative Processing, and Political Satire Programming

• In Event: Entertainment Media and Politics

Abstract

The investigation focuses on the content of political satire interviews and the impact of exposure to interviews from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on viewers’ elaborative processing. Study 1 presents a content analysis of category types appearing as guests on TDS and TCR over an eleven-year period (N = 3201). Utilizing machine learning to assist a large-scale manual coding process, the results of the content analysis suggest that satire programs are an outlet for more serious content and have proven to be a useful resource for politicians and journalists. Study 2 relies on the analysis of experimental data (N = 265), using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to explore the various factors, including news content affinity, comedy learning, and exposure to comedy interviews, that explain variation in elaborative processing. The results show that viewing comedy is positively related to elaborative processing given a prior affinity for entertaining news.

Authors

• Amy B. Becker, Loyola University Maryland

• Andrew B Goldberg, Arcode Corporation