Us folks over at Crooks and Liars have been saying for sometime now that "The Daily Show "is able to show more truth and honesty in politics than any other show you might see on TV. Jon Stewart appeared on Bill O'Reilly's show and Bill called his audience "stoners and slackers" and constantly questioned Mr. Stewart on John Kerry's motives for doing The Daily Show, but passing up The O'Reilly factor. , is pissed off that the Daily Show is corrupting our youth and weakening our democracy, or something like that. This goes out to anyone who is disturbed by the fact that a large portion of the country gets their news from the Daily Show.

Viewers of late-night comedy programs, especially The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on the cable channel Comedy Central, are more likely to know the issue positions and backgrounds of presidential candidates than people who do not watch late-night comedy, the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey shows.

Polling conducted between July 15 and Sept. 19 among 19,013 adults showed that on a six-item political knowledge test people who did not watch any late-night comedy programs in the past week answered 2.62 items correctly, while viewers of Late Night with David Letterman on CBS answered 2.91, viewers of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno answered 2.95, and viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart answered 3.59 items correctly. That meant there was a difference of 16 percentage points between Daily Show viewers and people who did not watch any late-night programming.

You know what I would really like to see? A comparison between the responses of people who watch the Daily Show and people who watch Fox News. We already saw the comparison showing Fox News viewership was directly linked to people who thought we had found stockpiles of WMD in Iraq and Iraq was working with Al Qaeda, I wonder how well Fox News viewers understand basic campaign positions.