Satirical Fake News and/as American Political Discourse

Abstract

Over the past decade, satirical fake news has emerged as ubiquitous form of popular political discourse that questions, above all else, the logic and integrity of contemporary journalistic practices. Through various manifestations, satirical fake news has incited much-needed revaluation of journalism's relationship to politics and civic culture. As Jeffrey P. Jones observes in Entertaining Politics: Satiric Television and Political Engagement, critical discussions of emergent forms of satire like fake news (Jones' terminology) have appeared in large part due to a fundamental change in political communication in America (7). Whereas entertainment television has traditionally shied away from the realm of politics (only occasionally exploring political themes and subjects), politics now forms an integral part of entertainment programming. This shift, Jones argues, has been instrumental in blurring the boundaries between serious and entertaining discourse(s), placing politics squarely (and perhaps uncomfortably) at the center of new debates surrounding the function and value of entertainment in civic culture. It is important to illuminate the formal and rhetorical elements fake news deploys in its sustained critiques of news media, devices that have significantly enabled political satirists to reframe the representation of meaningful issues in the public sphere. This process of re-presentation functions through the form's juxtaposition of factual and fictional elements, process that highlights the discrepancies, omissions, and general flaws in logic that mark everyday news reportage. The Iraq War and the 2008 American Presidential Election To crystallize my argument, this essay examines fake news' re-presentation of political discourse through two critical frames, the Iraq War and the 2008 American presidential election, issues heavily reported in mainstream news media that continue to attract significant attention from various scholars. Recent scholarship on the Iraq War addresses number of disparate issues: news coverage and propaganda (Dimaggio 2009; Melkote 2009; Moeller 2004;), politics/political theory (Hallenberg & Karlsson 2005; Lee 2010; Zizek 2004), democratic politics (Danchev & MacMillan 2005), feminist critique (Jeffreys 2007; Oliver 2007; Sjoberg 2006), human casualties (Burnham 2006), narrative (Ringmar 2006), capitalism (Klein 2007), and economics (Stiglitz & Bilmes 2008), to cite but few. Elsewhere, scholarship on the 2008 presidential election has explored issues related to race (Sinclair-Chapman & Price 2008), gender (Whitaker 2008; Lawrence & Rose 2010), social change (Harlow 2009), political campaigning and advertising (Panagopoulos 2009), campaign financing reform (see Lessig's Change Congress), education (Carter 2011), economics (Halcoussis et al. 2009), and social media (Hendricks & Denton 2010). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these two separate phenomena deserve examination because these issues consistently appear in broad range of satirical fake news examples. Examples here come almost exclusively from The Onion and The Daily Show due in large part to their prolific output and strong emphasis on these two issues.1 The following discussion of these highly charged political events highlights how satirical fake news coverage shifts and expands the representation of larger sets of issues in the public sphere. Satirical fake news narratives add critical complexity to dominant forms of political discourse through their reflexive engagement with contemporary journalism. The following essay examines how political satirists challenge and subvert the codes and conventions of traditional journalism through number of satiric, ironic, and parodie appropriations, in the interests of revealing the inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and failures of mainstream media reportage. Bush Quietly Rolls Back Iraq Death Toll To Zero In June 2006, the New York Times reported that George W. …