The Spring 2016 Political Reporting class was a fantastic class, teaching me many things about the government (both local and national), and gave me great opportunities to express my new knowledge of politics through blog posts, interview opportunities and writing assignments. Of all the assignments I have done in the course, my favorite was the final feature. I got to choose the topic I wrote about, which made the assignment a lot more personal and much more enjoyable to write. As much as I enjoyed the other assignments, I saw a lot more of myself in the writing of this feature.

My final feature was about late-night television talk shows and the effect they may have on viewers’ political participation. As someone who wants to go into broadcasting, I am an avid viewer of talk shows, and have even been part of the in-studio audience for  The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Late Show with David Letterman, and Late-Night with Seth Meyers.

While I pride myself on being able to incorporate my newfound passion for politics into a story about late-night television, something I was already passionate about before taking the class, I cannot take all of the credit for coming up with the idea. When I was first given the assignment, I struggled to find a topic, until Professor Pearson mentioned to me that I should write about late-night television, knowing it would be a topic that I would enjoy. From there, I came up with my topic.

Before doing formal research, I wanted to conduct a study of my own. Using the research software company, Qualtrics, I sent out a survey with 12 questions, asking participants about their source(s) of political news, if they had ever watched late-night television, which late-night shows they’ve watched, and if their exposure has ever impacted their political engagement, either motivating or discouraging their participation.  I also conducted two Twitter-Polls, a feature on Twitter that allows a user to tweet a single question. I did not reference my twitter polls in my feature, because one poll received zero responses, and the other received only two, bearing inconclusive results.

In my research process, I went onto various communication databases provided by the TCNJ Library, ultimately using a study by Hoon Lee, which I found through the EBSCO Host research database. His study was quite similar to mine in that we both wanted to find out the effect that exposure to late-night television had on political participation, as well as the fact that he and I both used the research software company, Qualtrics, to conduct our studies.

The most challenging part of writing my story was getting efficient quotes from appropriate sources. I thought I would reach out to writers of late-night television shows via LinkedIn, but finding them became too much of a challenge with my approaching deadline. I thought I would interview my professor who has, at times, used late-night television in class, but she (understandably) felt it wouldn’t be appropriate for her to be quoted in a paper that she would be assessing. Using the email attached to his study findings,

I reached out to Hoon Lee, but he did not respond. I called up my professor to get some direction on where to go for quotes, and she directed me to TCNJ Alumnus, Dave Croatto, who works in political satire. I reached out to him to get his two cents but he, too, was unresponsive. I reached out to a couple of my friends who work in late-night television and my college friend, Folake Ayiloge was kind enough to respond. I’m sure that if I had been assigned this story at a time of the semester when final exams were not going on, I would have gotten more responses.

Towards the end of the writing process, my spin on the story changed. My Qualtrics had shown an overwhelming amount of people who were neither motivated nor discouraged to engage in politics as a result of exposure to late-night television, as compared to the small handful of participants who were motivated. As a result of these findings, I felt dissatisfied. I did not expect the majority of participants to not feel motivated, especially since these findings conflicted with the those of previous scholarly studies, so I began to focus on the flaws of my study.

However, my dissatisfaction went away when I realized that I was focusing on the wrong piece of the data. Yes, the majority of participants did not feel motivated, but the fact that a number of participants did feel motivated, regardless of how small the percentage, shows that exposure to late-night television does in fact have an impact on political participation!

With the focus of my study shifting from how many feel engaged to whether there is any impact on engagement at all, my findings began to match up with those of previous scholars, and I felt my study results were conclusive.

There were moments in this assignment that put into perspective all the knowledge I have learned while taking the political reporting class. One moment was when I was reading an article about Jon Stewart which briefly mentioned Citizens United. Thanks to my time spent learning about Citizens United in class, I understood the reference and its relevancy.

Towards the end of my writing process, I had to adjust the findings of my Qualtrics because I had originally included the results from up until May 11th, but on May 15th I saw that one more person had taken the survey since then.

I hope readers will learn from my feature that late-night television, other than being a form of entertainment, bears legitimacy in its reporting of political news. It has a real impact on political participation, and even serves as the main source of political news for some viewers. Furthermore, I hope that my reporting will change the attitude of naysayers of late-night television.