News Parody and Political Satire Across the Globe

Geoffrey Baym, Jeffrey Jones, Jeffrey P. Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135751715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years, the US fake news program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has become a surprisingly important source of information, conversation, and commentary about public affairs. Perhaps more surprisingly, so-called 'fake news' is now a truly global phenomenon, with various forms of news parody and political satire programming appearing throughout the world.

This collection of innovative chapters takes a close and critical look at global news parody from a wide range of countries including the USA and the UK, Italy and France, Hungary and Romania, Israel and Palestine, Iran and India, Australia, Germany, and Denmark. Traversing a range of national cultures, political systems, and programming forms, News Parody and Political Satire Across the Globe offers insight into the central and perhaps controversial role that news parody has come to play in the world, and explores the multiple forces that enable and constrain its performance. It will help readers to better understand the intersections of journalism, politics, and comedy as they take shape across the globe in a variety of political and media systems.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Popular Communication.

News Parody in Global Perspective: Politics, Power, and Resistance

Geoffrey Baym

Jeffrey P. Jones

As scholarly examinations of the US news parody programs The Daily Show and The Colbert Report multiply, we must recognize that American satirists claim no monopoly on the genre. Upon closer inspection, news parody appears as a truly universal phenomenon; in any culture where television is used as a means of disseminating authoritative information about the real, parody—what some have labeled, or mislabeled “fake news”—plays an increasingly important discursive function. In this article, we provide an overview of international forms of news parody and political satire as they take shape across continents and cultures. We consider the global flow of parody formats, and the multiple ways in which news parody adapts to differing political, economic, and regulatory contexts. Further, we explore the semiotic labor that parody performs in deconstructing broadcast news and wider discourses of authority. Finally, we discuss the political significance of global news parody and the role the genre plays as a popular response to power.

In the midst of the UK phone-hacking scandal that consumed international attention in the summer of 2011, an interesting issue arose on the globally popular US news parody program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In late July, when British Prime Minister David Cameron was called before a testy House of Commons to defend his relationship with agents of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, The Daily Show ran a montage of Cameron facing a barrage of heated comments, to which Stewart gleefully proclaimed, “England is awesome!” Despite the satirical praise, viewers in the United Kingdom who tuned in to the weekly global edition of the program usually broadcast on Channel 4 were not able to see that particular segment—a point Stewart himself incredulously discussed on his show a couple of weeks later. Then, he explained that although the global edition of TDS is aired in 85 countries around the world, “including,” Stewart noted, “such free speech havens as, I don’t know, Chad, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen”—“I’m huge in Yemen,” he jested—British rules prevented a UK audience from seeing his friendly, although satirical, treatment of Parliament.

The reason, partially explained by Stewart, is that although Parliament agreed in 1989 to allow television cameras into its chambers, it explicitly forbade the use of that footage “in any light entertainment program or in a program of political satire.” Hoping to preserve the dignity of political power, the “rules of coverage” concede that Parliamentary footage may be used “in broadcast ‘magazine’ programs which also contain music or humorous features, provided that the different types of item are kept separate.”¹ On TDS, a puzzled Stewart insisted that he had seen “parliamentary footage used on satirical shows in Britain before,” a claim supported by a clip of a grotesque (and quite rubbery) “Margaret Thatcher” scolding a room full of equally grotesque (and rubbery) British lawmakers. That clip, of course, was from the long running and globally influential satire show Spitting Image, which for eight years skewered British politicians with its now-iconic puppetry.

Along with his homage to Spitting Image, Stewart’s brief discussion of his own global reach and the British rules governing satire raise a number of points that the contributions to this collection explore. At the least, the reference to Spitting Image reminds us that TDS did not invent political TV satire, or as we will see, news parody. Indeed, most efforts to trace the origins of the genre wind back to the United Kingdom, whose creative comedic minds have over the years helped pioneer the blurring of news and entertainment and the use of television comedy to poke at, if not outright undermine, the conventions and pretensions of so much of what passes on television as “news.” At the same time, Stewart’s reference to the 85 countries that broadcast The Daily Show’s Global Edition makes the point that news parody, even a program aimed so clearly at an American audience, resonates around the world. Even in countries as nondemocratic and, one might suspect, as humorless as, say, Somalia, one can find a comedian making serious fun of politicians and the news media that cover them. Indeed, as some of the authors in this collection suggest, it may be particularly in countries lacking healthy democratic debate where news parody plays its most vital role.

Third, Stewart’s abbreviated discussion of the British rules governing the use of Parliamentary footage make it clear that even in one of the world’s oldest democracies and in the culture that has historically made a primary contribution to the genre of television parody, satirists must always work within the political, legal, and regulatory context that both enables and often constrains what they can do. As we will see, producers of parody must negotiate a myriad of contextual frameworks—legal but also economic and cultural—that encourage some kinds of parody while dissuading others. Finally, the Stewart-Parliament incident demonstrates that beyond decorum and the belief that the serious work of governance demands a “discourse of sobriety” (Nichols, 1991), the British rules of coverage implicitly recognize the power of the popular and the underlying danger that parody can pose for the status quo.

This collection takes up these issues. We begin from the fundamental point that “the news”—as perhaps the most ubiquitous form of television programming found throughout the world—is also one of the most parodied television genres as well. What is more, such parodic and satirical response is truly a global phenomenon. Despite the considerable amount of scholarly attention paid to North American programs such as The Daily Show, little attention has been paid to news parody across national and regional contexts. We have little understanding of the number and range of parody programs one can find on televisions around the world, let alone of the similarities and differences among various global approaches. We have yet to consider what gives rise to such programming in countries with radically different media systems, political arrangements, and cultural contexts or why, broadly defined, the genre itself has become universally popular. Nor have we explored the multiple ways that such programs offer critiques and negotiate power. Through case studies of news parody in countries as diverse as the United Kingdom, Hungary, Italy, Palestine, India, and Iran, this project seeks to enhance our understanding of the intersections of news, comedy, and politics, as well as the power and possibilities of parody.

From a definitional perspective, we intentionally cast a wide net, recognizing that news parody is and can comprise many textual forms, from faux news anchors who posture authoritatively at pretend news desks, to puppet shows, sketch comedies, and panel discussions. As editors, one of our initial challenges was learning to see beyond our own assumptions of what constitutes parody and recognize the ways in which our own political, economic, and cultural context has shaped those assumptions. Thus we have not found it useful to categorize at the micro-level the varying types of programming that formalists might want to identify as say, satire or parody, social or political satire, and “fake news” or humorous discussions of the news. Instead, the key ingredient for us is that the programming we examine here uses humor to engage with, and offer critiques of, contemporary political life and current events. Hence “news parody” becomes an umbrella term for what at times can vary quite significantly in practice. While many programs discussed here do, in fact, employ a fake news style (similar to The Daily Show) in direct parody of the television news form, others use quite different methods (puppets, for example) in pursuit of similar goals.

Similarly, the programs covered here vary in the nature of their critique, ranging from the banal to the brutal. For instance, even within the context of US media, we see such extremes when comparing Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” and The Colbert Report. The former is longer running and much more familiar to popular audiences, yet the latter would be far more valued if one were strictly interested in political significance. In short, our operative mode in this project is expansive, rather than restrictive. We include forms of parody and satire that are meaningful to audiences within respective countries and satirical traditions; we do not attempt to impose narrow formalistic definitions to satisfy academic yearnings for clean typologies.

PARODY MATTERS

In our efforts to make sense of the wide and long-standing appeal of news parody and political satire across the globe, we begin from the fundamental assumption that parody is a serious matter, that it is, to quote Robert Hariman (2008), “essential for an engaged, sustainable, democratic public culture” (p. 248). Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) also reminds us that laughter is a form of resistance to power, and parody a critical means of confronting and deconstructing discourses of authority. We find it sensible, then, that news parody would resonate across a vast range of national and regional contexts. Itself a ubiquitous form of programming worldwide, television news constitutes a core aspect of public life—a central discursive locale for the circulation of information and argument fundamental to democratic (or, as some of the chapters in this collection suggest, democratizing) practice. At the same time, however, news is also a product of power. It always asserts the epistemological privilege of claiming “the way it is,” and offers those in positions of power, both political and economic, an authoritative platform for the shaping of public perceptions.

For the many manifestations of news and public affairs parody one can find around the world, the basic assumption that a democratic populace needs what James Madison once called a “source of popular information” (quoted in Alger, 1998, p. 4) serves as the launching point for critique of the actual sources of popular information, an examination, in varying degrees of acuity, of news practices in a variety of settings. In his contribution to this collection, for example, Graham Meikle explores the critique offered by the British comedian Chris Morris, one of the sharpest interlocutors of “the news.” Meikle argues that in his remarkable series Brass Eye (and before that The Day Today), Morris quite insightfully exposes the conventions of overly sensationalized and often breathless television news: its dramatic music, its thrilling if not always meaningful graphics, and its mode of address—its often explicit claim that, as an institution nominally committed to the public good, it is looking out for you. Brass Eye, Meikle suggests, “is a sustained exposure of the machinery” of broadcast news, exaggerating the conventions of news and current affairs programming until their “constructed nature becomes both apparent and absurd.”

One sees something similar in a remarkable range of cultural contexts, from the work of the Danish comedian Mikael Bertelsen, whose show De Uaktuelle Nyheder translates roughly to “News of No Current Interest,” to the recently launched German version of The Daily Show, to any number of Australian “fake news” programs, which as Stephen Harrington explains in this issue, have long functioned to expose the “vanity and phoniness” of Australian broadcast news, its mistaking of production quality for informational value. The central thrust of news parody, therefore, and perhaps the meat of its popular appeal is its work in deconstructing the artifice of news—the naturalistic illusion that news is (or could be) an unmediated window on the world (“Give us 30 minutes,” the US CNN Headline News once insisted, “and we’ll give you the world”). Even on the “Weekend Update” segment on the long-running US program Saturday Night Live, which as we have already suggested counts among the more banal forms of news parody, its hosts have reveled in revealing their own artifice (“I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not”), a comment on the undeniable, if often elided fact, that they, along with the real TV journalists, are always performing for the camera. Amber Day and Ethan Thompson argue here that on “Weekend Update” the intention has been less a parody of the news for the sake of political critique, but instead a vehicle to achieve other comedic, programming, and franchise branding strategies. In Italy, however, as Gabriele Cosentino explains in his contribution to this special issue, the popular program Striscia la Notizia (“The News is Creeping”) was created specifically to expose the artifice of news, and to undermine its ideological underpinnings. “You’d be watching the newscasts, thinking to simply receive news,” the show’s creator, Antonio Ricci, has written, “instead they’re selling you a political idea, and a car too.”

With several of the parodic programs considered in this collection, the focus shifts from the form of news to its content, from the ways in which news speaks, to that which it speaks of. News parody offers critical examination of both the information provided by the real news and the agendas that lie behind or beneath it. As regular viewers of The Daily Show in the United States have come to recognize, news parody not only exposes the machinery of news but in its more piercing forms also can confront the broader machinery of public discourse. We find several examples of parody interrogating the efforts by those in positions of power to shape popular understanding of the political sphere. We see this at its sharpest in the Iranian program Parazit (arriving via satellite and avenues of social media), which, as Mehdi Semati explains here, routinely confronts the explicit efforts of Iran’s theocratic regime to control public information.

Even in its least acute forms, where parody is less explicitly engaged in the semiotic struggle over public influence, it routinely provides opportunities simply for citizens to laugh at those who populate the narratives of news. As we see in discussions of programs in countries as diverse as France, Israel, and India, news parody is a comedic response to the ubiquity of images and the celebration of celebrity—entertainment and political stars alike—and the power both hold as foci of societal discourse. The shows present an opportunity for comeuppance, a means though which audiences are invited to reinterpret, ridicule, and challenge the characters that populate citizens’ public imaginations.

In addition to its deconstructive function—its efforts to unpack the form and content of news—news parody at times performs a constructive role, providing the citizenry with discursive resources often absent in “real” news. Jon Stewart, of course, has been ranked among the most trusted “journalists” in the United States. In Italy, that honor remarkably has gone to the giant red puppet Gabibbo, the star of the show Striscia, who actively solicits tips for potential news stories. Public opinion polls in Italy find that people more readily communicate their concerns to Gabibbo than they do to the country’s real journalists. In turn, the show has, over the years, been credited with breaking several important national stories. So, too, following the model of Jon Stewart’s interviews on The Daily Show, are increasing numbers of parodic programs offering real conversations with serious political figures. In such a discursively integrated landscape, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify the boundaries between real news and fake news, between parody and its referent.

News parody, therefore, ultimately functions as a kind of epistemological leveling—a challenge, if not inversion, of what Michel Foucault (1980) called “regimes of truth.” The various comedians, actors, and puppets around the world who use parody to interrogate the news are at the same time both constitutive and constituent of wider cultural transformations i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. News Parody in Global Perspective: Politics, Power, and Resistance
• 2. "Find Out Exactly What to Think—Next!": Chris Morris, Brass Eye, and Journalistic Authority
• 3. From the "Little Aussie Bleeder" to Newstopia: (Really) Fake News in Australia
• 4. No Strings Attached? Les Guignols de l'info and French Television
• 5. The Comical Inquisition: Striscia la Notizia and the Politics of Fake News on Italian Television
• 6. Localizing The Daily Show: The heute show in Germany
• 7. Transgressing Boundaries as the Hybrid Global: Parody and Postcoloniality on Indian Television
• 8. Satire in the Holy Wonderland: The Comic Framing of Arab Leaders in Israel
• 9. Out of Control: Palestinian News Satire and Government Power in the Age of Social Media
• 10. The Geopolitics of Parazit, the Iranian Televisual Sphere, and the Global Infrastructure of Political Humor
• 11. The Witty Seven: Late Socialist-Capitalist Satire in Hungary
• 12. "The Tattlers' Tattle": Fake News, Linguistic National Intimacy, and New Media in Romania
• 13. Political Satire in Danish Television: Reinventing a Tradition
• 14. Live From New York, It's the Fake News! Saturday Night Live and the (Non)Politics of Parody
• Index