Attention, mainstream media (and, yes, I'm calling out myself here, too): A lot of younger Americans are tuning you out in favor of - gasp! - comedians.

A national phone survey by Rasmussen Reports finds that 30 percent of Americans age 18-29 and 32 percent of Americans age 30-39 believe satirical news programs - like "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" or "The Colbert Report" - are replacing traditional news outlets.

The survey found 42 percent of the thirty-somethings and 35 percent of the 18-29 group disagreed with that opinion.

True, "The Daily Show" and Colbert's program are intelligent and funny takes on the news - and, more importantly, takes on the people who bring us the news. And it's true that those shows sometimes make news, like when Stewart smacked down CNBC's Jim Cramer over that network's sucking-up-to-CEOs coverage before the financial bubble burst.

But what people conveniently forget is that shows like "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" - like most of the bloggers and other aggregators of information that dominate the Internet - all rely on the "mainstream media" for their source material.

Without the shoe-leather reporting that appears in newspapers and TV newscasts every day, the satirists would have nothing to satirize and the bloggers wouldn't be able to link to anything.

The worry in journalism - and you see it now with the online-only seattlepi.com - is that the online packaging of news is more important than the generation of the information that's being packaged.

Labels: journalism, television