I just read one of those articles that makes me want to pummel the author.  The offending article is titled "Show Biz Demeans Politics" appeared in the Raleigh News & Observer and the headline alone should give you an indication of how dimwitted the article is itself.  After all the politicians haven't needed any help demeaning themselves, and entertainers are merely picking the low hanging fruit that the politicians have handed them.

As for the article itself just take a quick read of this excerpt and see if you can keep from groaning:

A survey by the Pew Center for the People and the Press in 2004
found that 61 percent of people under the age of 30 got some of their
political "news" from late-night comedy shows.

So what is wrong
with this? Plenty, says Russell Peterson, a former stand-up comic and
political cartoonist turned political scientist at the University of
Iowa.

The effect of endless jokes lampooning our political
leaders is "implicitly anti-democratic," Peterson says. It plays to the
deeply ingrained American belief that our political leaders are jokes
and that the democratic system is "an irredeemable sham."

"Election
after election, night after night, joke after joke, they have
reinforced the notion that political participation is pointless,
parties and candidates are interchangeable, and democracy is futile,"
Peterson writes in his new book "Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night
Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke" (Rutgers University Press, 2008).

So exercising free speech in the form of humor is implicitly anti-democratic?  Cynicism is suddenly anti-American?  What the authors of the study and the article seem to be blindly ignorant of is that they are the ones engaging in anti-democratic thinking and elitism.  Somehow they can't seem to grasp that the folks who are watching the Daily Show can only find it funny if they happen to be paying attention to the issues.  Political jokes aren't funny if you don't know the politicians, don't know the issues and thus can't put the joke in context.  Did it not occur to the authors that people can think for themselves, that being cynical is not inherently bad, or that people under 30 do have the capacity for critical thinking? 

I hate to tell the esteemed authors but these days the parties and candidates ARE largely interchangeable and we the voters aren't to be blamed for perceiving them that way.  Both parties have raided the treasury for their own purposes and pointed the finger at the other for "pork barrel spending".  Both parties were implicit in running up a staggering deficit, building a monolithic bureaucracy and manufacturing an atmosphere of disdain for the other party.  Late night comedians didn't do it, the parties did.  That's great business for the comedians and a tragedy for the country.