Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how Danish textual news satire constructs its social critique of the many Facebook users whose comments during COVID-19 imitate expert statements in disregard of authoritative health science statements. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, UNESCO has proclaimed a disinfodemic of emotive narrative constructs and pseudo-science on the internet and especially in social media. As with the ruling Party’s paradoxical slogan “ignorance is strength” in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, we sense a similar trend of the public disinfodemic, but studies of this paradox in satirical publications are scarce. Thus, the goal here is to scrutinize this enigma exemplified in an article in the Danish spoof news online media of RokokoPosten in which such experts are parodied in a kind of “doublethink” style which begs critical reflection on social media credibility. Hence, such textual news satire may potentially provide a vaccine against post-truth delusions of health science as it provides immunity against the disinfodemic by its own causative agents.
Highlights
The goal of this study is to put the linguistic and stylistic construction of textual news satire about the disinfodemic of COVID-19 under a qualitative microscope
The cognitively demanding nature of news satire may be regarded as belonging to UNESCO’s infodemic combat strategies of both public condemnation of disinformation and media literacy development as social satire both condemns behaviour and trends in society and educates the readers to exercise critical thinking when exploring the social media. This Danish spoof news article conveys its social criticism of COVID-19 Facebook experts through a linguistic and stylistic double take – or doublethink – on reality and truth vs. non-reality and non-truth
This is orchestrated by way of intertextual, critical and comic components of lexical, pragmatic and rhetorical subcomponents which make up a structure and texture of surprisingly colliding scripts, parody, irony and an interplay of exaggeration and understatement which express the ridicule of the power of ignorance in social media responses to COVID-19
Summary
The goal of this study is to put the linguistic and stylistic construction of textual news satire about the disinfodemic of COVID-19 under a qualitative microscope. Since news satire has the purpose of correcting the malaises of society, this kind of ‘doublethink’ may become a vaccine against delusions of health science as it provides immunity against the disinfodemic by its own causative agents Even though this reasoning is unfolded in intricate metaphorical terms, it is still safe to propose that news satire may remind news consumers to reflect on the illusory endeavour of searching for the truth, while at the same time functioning as a critique of the curiosity and clickbait codes and conventions of news media in general (Reilly 2012; Berkowitz and Schwartz 2016; Auken 2019). I hope to contribute with significant knowledge about the linguistic construction of news satire in the fields of textual news satire, rhetoric, and text and discourse analysis
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