Abstract
Previous research suggests that a defining characteristic of satirical news shows (e.g. The Daily Show) is discursive integration: a creative blend of genre conventions of regular news and fiction. This study aimed to extend the concept of discursive integration to another popular form of satirical news: written satirical news. We focused on both liberal (e.g. The Onion) and conservative (e.g. The Babylon Bee) online outlets of satire. We collected texts published in 2018 by a total of 36 satirical news, regular news and fiction websites (65,530,647 words). Discursive integration was measured by means of linguistic register, because genres can be effectively identified through patterns of linguistic features. Four linguistic register dimensions were identified. Findings showed that written satirical news is indeed characterised by discursive integration because written satirical news’ register scored in between the registers of written regular news and written fiction. No differences in discursive integration levels were found between liberal and conservative satirical news. This study demonstrates the value of discursive integration for understanding the genre of satirical news across partisan lines.
Highlights
Previous research suggests that a defining characteristic of satirical news shows (e.g. The Daily Show) is discursive integration: a creative blend of genre conventions of regular news and fiction
In order to identify whether and how regular news and fiction genres are discursively integrated in written satirical news, we propose to study linguistic register, defined as patterns of co-occurring linguistic features of collections of texts (Scarcella, 2003)
With regard to discursive integration, this means that we find evidence for the presence of discursive integration in satirical news when satirical news has a linguistic register that reflects a combination of the registers that belong to the regular news and fiction genres
Summary
Previous research suggests that a defining characteristic of satirical news shows (e.g. The Daily Show) is discursive integration: a creative blend of genre conventions of regular news and fiction. This study aimed to extend the concept of discursive integration to another popular form of satirical news: written satirical news We focused on both liberal (e.g. The Onion) and conservative (e.g. The Babylon Bee) online outlets of satire. Much research has focused on identifying which characteristics set satirical news apart from regular news (see Becker and Waisanen, 2013, for an overview) Most of these studies examined audiovisual satirical news in the form of television shows such as The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live and Last Week Tonight. The most popular online outlets of written satirical news (e.g. The Onion, The Borowitz Report; Faris et al, 2017) target a liberal audience, but there are certainly conservative alternatives (e.g. The Babylon Bee, Clickhole’s Resistance Hole) These conservative satire outlets have hardly received scholarly attention, perhaps because they are less known to the general public than their liberal counterparts (Young, 2019). This study advances our knowledge of satirical news as a genre across partisan lines
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