Having just passed its 10- year anniversary of being on the air, Comedy Central's The Daily Show has had an impact on the academic world at Penn State and beyond.

Charles Elavsky, associate professor in media studies, said students in his classes have brought up the satire of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as ways of supporting their arguments or contributing to class discussion.

Elavsky said The Daily Show is particularly effective at "raising an awareness of how the big stories were overlooked by the major media."

Associate professor of political science Marie Hojnacki said she used some of The Daily Show's "Indecision 2004" election coverage in her classes.

"It breaks up the monotony of lecture in class," she said. "It offers complex political news and drips away the partisanship and contentious aspects."

However, some have criticized The Daily Show for the way it portrays the issues.

"It promotes negativity towards the government, and I think it has a liberal sentiment," David Schweitzer (freshman-division of undergraduate studies) said.

Andrew Dubyak (senior-crime and law) said while he enjoys the show, he agrees with the criticism that it displays a bias.

"You have to remember that it's really liberal," he said.

Ben Phillips (senior-history) said even though he's a registered Republican, he enjoys watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

"Even though the show has a very liberal spin to it, even Republicans can enjoy it," he said.

Jonathan Morris, assistant professor of political science at East Carolina University, co-authored an article published in May about a Daily Show study he conducted with colleague Jody Baumgartner.

"We started to notice our students referencing information they had received from Stewart's show," Morris said.

Morris said he and Baumgartner noticed that some of their students were using The Daily Show as a primary news source.

Elavsky said that many of his students say they get most of their news from The Daily Show.

"Every class I've had claimed they got their news from [Daily Show host] Jon Stewart and The Daily Show more than any other medium," he said.

Nicole McCann (senior-English) said The Daily Show is a good source of news as long as the viewer gets the joke.

"Especially with our age group, they're more easily reached by things like that than CNN or Fox News," McCann said.

Dubyak said the show is an entertaining alternative.

"It makes news interesting," he said.

However, Morris said the negativity of the program was a concern for him and Baumgartner.

"There's an image that comes out from Jon Stewart's program that politicians are inept, the system is broken," he said.

For their study, they showed clips of The Daily Show's election coverage to one group of students and clips of CBS's election coverage to another group. A third group did not see any clips.

Participants in the study were then asked a number of questions designed to gauge their perceptions of the politicians and issues featured in the clips.

Morris and Baumgartner discovered that students who watched The Daily Show clips were more likely to react cynically when asked about the issues.

While Morris said his study wasn't meant to measure the implications of this, the cynicism created by The Daily Show probably isn't a good thing, as it may reduce civic engagement.

"We wanted to illustrate that the effects of The Daily Show are not benign," Morris said. "There's a lot of research that indicates that cynicism is unhealthy."

Anthony Lutz (sophomore-information sciences and technology) said he agreed with the findings of the study.

"Being exposed to the [cynicism] makes people act it too," Lutz said.

Phillips felt the show shouldn't be blamed for people's cynicism.

"The actual things that politicians do should affect how you feel about them," he said.

According to the National Annenberg Election Survey conducted in 2004 by the University of Pennsylvania, viewers of The Daily Show were better informed about current events than those who just watched traditional cable TV news.

"It's entirely possible that Jon Stewart's giving the most accurate presentation," Morris said.

--Lauren Boyer contributed to this article.