"The Daily Show," Can We Take It Seriously Yet?

It seems to me that in this class, along with other journalism and communication classes I have taken, that one of the major questions we seek to answer is "What is news?" or "What makes good news?" The answer to these questions seems to have become increasingly unclear, when people like Katie Couric, a supposedly "real" news anchor is seen as a joke whereas anchors like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are taken more and more seriously everyday. This article, presented to me in my most recent Press in America class asks,  "Why is it that this sort of mock-news has resonated so well with much of the United States?" 

Personally, I think that programs like "The Daily Show" are as succesful as they are because they present news in a more accessible and less pretentious way than traditional news shows. Quite frankly, anchors like Stewart and Colbert have fun with the news, especially political news, and its so much more enjoyable and refreshing to watch a program that uses humor as a means to alert and inform the public rather than traditional programs that seem to rely on scare tactics.