Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert: Dems’ Oct. surprise?
After years of working up increasingly elaborate Glenn Beck impersonations, Jon Stewart now plans the most spectacular one of them all – a rally on the National Mall, in conjunction with his trusty faux foil, Stephen Colbert.
Positioning himself as the anti-Beck, Stewart presented his October 30th “Rally to Restore Sanity” on his show Thursday night as a protest against extremism and bellicose rhetoric on both the left and the right. Colbert kept in character as a blowhard conservative by announcing his “March to Keep Fear Alive” right afterwards
t’s a joke, of course, but also an unavoidably political act. Despite Beck’s protestations that his rally was not planned as a political event, it was widely viewed as a yardstick for the motivating power of the tea party. Similarly, no matter how much Comedy Central insists it’s all just a goof, Stewart and Colbert’s rally will be read as an important measure of the enthusiasm of young Democratic-leaning voters ten days before the mid-term elections.
That’s because, according to a Pew Research Center study released on Sunday, 58% of Daily Show and 64% of Colbert Report viewers described themselves as progressive, with 69% and 68% of them, respectively, approving of President Barack Obama’s job performance.
By contrast, three quarters of Beck’s regular viewers say they are Republican, and only 10% of them approve of the president’s job performance.
Interestingly, the Glenn Beck Show and the Daily Show are exactly tied in the percentage of the population that watches them – 7% — second only to “The O’Reilly Factor” with 10%. The Colbert Report is slightly behind at 6%.
But their audiences are very different, and not just because of ideology. The largest segment of Glenn Beck’s audience is over 65, while the largest segment that watches the Daily Show and the Colbert Report is under 30, according to the study. As the study’s authors put it, writing about both Stewart and Colbert: “Young people are about as likely to regularly watch these comedy shows as they are to regularly watch the network evening news, weekday morning news shows, or CNN.”
