International Law

The Associated Press reports on an interesting finding:

A journalism think tank studying "The Daily Show" doesn't believe many people get their news from Jon Stewart ? because otherwise they wouldn't get the jokes.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism also said it was surprised at how much the Comedy Central late-night program resembles "The O'Reilly Factor," "Hardball" and other cable news shows in content.

The Washington-based organization asked its researchers to study a year's worth of "The Daily Show" tapes ? hardly a grim assignment ? after hearing the frequent claim that many young people learn about the world from Stewart instead of more traditional news sources.

Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director, said he doubts this is the case. He considers "The Daily Show" more of a political satire in the tradition of newspapermen like Art Buchwald, H.L. Mencken and Russell Baker.

...

The show is actually making some very serious political commentary, "but they use humor to do it," Rosenstiel said.

...

While Stewart aims most of his firepower at Republicans, the show is actually pretty balanced in its bookings, the study noted. Of the clearly partisan, 15 guests were conservative and 18 were liberal. Presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain was a guest on Wednesday's show.

"The fact that the lineup of guests is actually even surprised me," Rosenstiel said. "I thought going in that there weren't that many Republicans who would be willing to go on the show."

Read more here (from Yahoo! News).  Still, I don't think you'll see a riff like this from Bill O'Reilly: