Between Headlines and Punchlines: Journalistic Role Performance in Western News Satire
From Sara Ödmarka at the Department of Communication, Quality Management and Information Systems, Mid Sweden University,Sundsvall, Sweden and Jonas Nicola at the Center for Sociological Research, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
“When I asked people ‘Are you journalists?’ they would say no. But if I asked them ‘Is what is what you do journalistic?’ they say yes, of course.”
News satire has gained popularity across the globe in recent years. At the start of the twenty-first century, shows such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were uniformly recognized as benchmarks for the news satire genre, where today, it has proliferated into a wide array of different formats that blend discursive modes of entertainment and politics (Brugman et al.2021). The result is a spectrum ranging from more absurdist, comedic forms of satire on the one hand, to explicitly “journalistic” and informative formats on the other. Shows such as Last Week Tonight are characterized by the collaboration of professional journalists alongside professional comedians, the use of journalistic techniques, and the overt pursuit of journalistic goals (Koivukoski and Ödmark2020). Despite originating outside the boundaries of the traditional journalistic field, such forms of news satire nonetheless “reflect the socio-informative functions, identities, and roles of journalism”(Eldridge2019, 858). In a rapidly changing digital landscape, these programs gain traction and visibility due to their contributions to public debate and impact on political policy (Boukes2019). This exemplifies how the current moment is characterized by what Nieuwenhuis and Zijp (2022) recently termed the repoliticization of humor: a sociopolitical context where humor and comedy increasingly take part in the negotiation of societal power struggles.
Furthermore, this repoliticization of humor refers to the increasing extent to which political contributions of humor are explicitly debated in the public sphere. Conventionally, satirists are known to minimize their roles as political commentators (Young2012) or have been delegitimized as journalistic outsiders (Tenenboim-Weinblatt2009). Today, satirists are increasingly acknowledging their involvement in public debates and, as a result, their political impact has become the topic of public scrutiny with satirists themselves openly acknowledging levels of journalistic accountability and accepting the label of“investigative comedy”(Nicolaï, Maeseele, and Boukes2022).
This maturation of news satire as an alternative form of journalism thus underlines the necessity for further research into the journalistic roles that such formats carry out. Pre-vious research on satirists’roles presents a fragmented and somewhat theoretically dis-jointed view. Some have focused on the role conceptions and perceptions of the satirists themselves (see Lichtenstein, Nitsch, and Wagner2021; Ödmark2021; Ödmarkand Harvard2021), while others have zoomed in on singular aspects pertaining to th ejournalistic (e.g., Kilby2018; Waisanen2018). These studies have placed news satire within specific journalistic subgenres which has been named, for instance, journalistic news satire (Koivukoski and Ödmark2020) or satirical journalism (Fox2018). However, which kind of journalistic role performances these hybrid genres employ has not yet been investigated as a whole. This study addresses these concerns by offering a structured and empirically tested understanding of journalistic role performances in Western news satire. To this end, we comparatively assess the journalistic roles in three international news satire formats i.e., the United States ’Last Week Tonight(LWT), the Swedish Svenska Nyheter(SN), and the Dutch Zondag met Lubach(ZML), guided by the overarching research question: To what extent are journalistic roles performed in news satire?
After a general introduction to journalistic roles and role performances, we discuss the extent to which news satire can incorporate journalistic methods and perform journalistic roles. Based on the literature review, we present six roles to be empirically tested in our study: (i)Reporter, (ii)Advocate, (iii)Watchdog, (iv)Civic Educator, (v)Comedic Interlocutor, and (vi)Loyalist. Following a description of our cases and methods, the results section provides an overview of the roles and their findings. We conclude by discussing the importance of our findings and their implications for a broader understanding of the alternative conceptions of professional journalism today.
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