Primacy effects of The Daily Show and national tv news viewing: young viewers, political gratifications, and internal political

Future research on the relations between various forms of entertainment- and public-affairs-based political media use should seek to identify effects that are more long term in nature. Short-term effects provide a solid foundation for initiating a research agenda, but the ultimate goal should be the identification of influences that last for longer periods of time. In addition, this study focused on the perceptual level, but the study of media gratifications is intricately linked to analyses of behaviors (i.e., media use). Future research should advance along the hierarchy of effects to assess the behavioral outcomes associated with the combined use of The Daily Show and more traditional political information outlets. Most important, political communication research should continue to study how the use of emerging entertainment-based forms of political communication work with the consumption of traditional outlets like national television news to produce a variety of effects. This study is an analysis of the primacy effects produced through varied consumptions patterns of The Daily Show and national television news, but the broader message of this work is a call for the discipline to not study entertainment and public affairs content in relative isolation.

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