davelj, polls have shown that Daily/Colbert viewers are actually fairly well informed about national affairs when compared to other cable news viewers. Yeah, I know… polls… but the findings are still interesting:
These are the principal findings of an in-depth Pew Research Center survey that interviewed a representative national sample of 1,502 adults between Feb.1-13, 2007. Respondents were asked to identify public figures who had recently been in the news. They also were asked questions that measured how much they knew about important and widely covered news events. Awareness of public figures varied widely.