Poll Predicts Who Would Win in O’Reilly vs. Colbert Presidential Match-up

Every year, Public Policy Polling does a survey on trust in TV news. This year, like each of the past four years, they found that Fox News is both the most trusted and least trusted name in news. Since that is no longer a surprise, they added one new feature to the poll that could tell you something unexpected about the way Americans view TV pundits — of both the real and fake varieties.

PPP pitted Fox’s Bill O’Reilly against the man who has made a career emulating him, Stephen Colbert, in an extremely hypothetical presidential match-up. A head-to-head contest between the two men resulted in a within-the-margin-of-error tossup, with O’Reilly in the lead 38% to Colbert’s 35% (27% of respondents weren’t sure they wanted either man as their president).

However, when broken down by phone vs. internet results, the numbers told a different story. Phone respondents picked O’Reilly 42 to 32%, while internet respondents picked Colbert 43 to 25%. Those numbers reflect the fact that Colbert has one of the youngest audiences on TV, while O’Reilly has one of the oldest.

One other area in which Colbert has an edge over O’Reilly? His hair. 38% of people thought Colbert has “better hair,” while only 13% said so for O’Reilly.

[photo via Today]

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