Apparently, some people at Ohio State University have been mucking around with science in a way that they aught not have.

They seemed to have proven that Stephen Colbert might actually be forwarding the conservative agenda…

[University communications doctoral students] subjected 322 participants with a mix of political ideologies to a three-minute 2006 video clip of Stephen Colbert discussing media coverage of the Iraq war with "super liberal lefty" radio host Amy Goodman.

They then asked participants to evaluate Colbert's ideology and his attitude towards liberalism. What they found was that the more liberal participants reported their own ideology to be, the more liberal they thought Colbert was. And the more conservative they reported their own ideology to be, the more conservative they thought Colbert was. Both, however, found him equally funny. The results are published in the April edition of the International Journal of Press/Politics.

"Liberals will see him as an over-the-top satire of Bill O'Reilly-type pundit and think that he is making fun of a conservative pundit," LaMarre explained. "But conservatives will say, yes, he is an over-the-top satire of Bill O'Reilly, but by being funny he gets to make really good points and make fun of liberals. So they think the joke is on liberals."

I gotta tell you, as a pretty fierce liberal and very staunch supporter of scientific research, I'm kinda torn on these findings.

I mean, I instinctively want to accept, on faith, anything that any person wearing a white coat and holding a clipboard says. But, on the other hand, my sense of liberal self-righteousness bristles at the idea of having my godless view of the world questioned in any way.

I wonder what Stephen Colbert has to say about this? He'll tell me what to think.