Satirical News Research Articles

Satire, honey and tears: how The Onion and The Babylon Bee do satire

Abstract Although American news satire trends towards the left side of the political spectrum, satire is not unique to liberal viewpoints. Conservative news satire, published by outlets such as The Babylon Bee, lend evidence to the ability for right-wing views to be advanced using satirical methods. Despite political differences, existing comparisons of left- and right-wing news satire suggest a high degree of structural similarity. In contrast, qualitative content-based analyses suggest clear political biases which differentiate the satire from these sources. In this study, we compare left- and right-wing American news satire across different structural and content-based features using a combination of quantitative, computational, and qualitative approaches. Our results mirror those of prior studies, indicating similarities in terms of structure but not content. These results further speak to the importance of taking conservative satire seriously, as well as to the necessity of a multi-pronged approach when studying the complex nature of satirical discourse.

Satire Between the Lines: Negotiating Genre Hybridity in the Satirical Newsroom of De Ideale Wereld

ABSTRACT The proliferation of political entertainment has internationally produced a wide variety of news satire formats which blend journalistic conventions with comedic storytelling. This paper investigates the production of the Belgian news satire show De Ideale Wereld through a genre theory lens, viewing genre as enacted practice. It reports on 23 interviews with the show's hosts and editorial staff and a three-week observation period in its “satirical newsroom.” The findings reveal how the creators of De Ideale Wereld engage in an on­going negotiation of comedic and journalistic roles inspired by irreconcilable genre identities, embodying conflicting intentions located on different ends of the spectrum between comedic absurdity and journalistic inquiry. Furthermore, by adhering to journalistic practices such as fact-checking and news values, the show's creators navigate perceived limitations to the subjectivity inherent to their roles as comedic professionals. This article contributes to the limited understanding of the production of news satire and the implications of hybridity on the understanding of comedic and journalistic practice.

Maneuvering Strategically with Corkscrewing in Satirical News Programs

The study aims to build the infrastructure of corkscrewing on an extended pragma-dialectical[i] ground, represented the theory of strategic maneuvering launched in (2002) by Eemern and Houtlosser. The methodology followed involves defining corkscrewing as a strategic concept subsuming goal and audience int its structure, and showing how this concept appeals to each of the three aspects of strategic maneuvering in order to be considered as one of its modes. It has been discovered that the three aspects are not equally instantiated, rather they are represented in a gradient manner. So, those aspects cannot be strictly considered 'inseparable', as called by their advocators, because they have been proved to be separable in corkscrewing yet working successfully. The study recommends investigating this phenomenon in other cultures and compare the results because culture-specificity may lead to vary strategies in a scalar way, thus it could be useful to study it within another culture to investigate whether it undergoes the same path of ‘thisness’ or not. The genre intended to be investigated is satirical news programs as they are specifically representative of what such a phenomenon requires.

The underlying mechanisms of the persuasiveness of different types of satirical news messages

ABSTRACT Research into the persuasiveness of satirical news has found mixed results. Two possible explanations lie in the lack of clarity about mechanisms underlying the influence of consuming different types of satirical content. In six experiments (Ntotal = 3,139), we investigated how (different types of) humorous versus nonhumorous (satirical) messages influenced recipients’ cognitive, emotional, and excitative responses and how these responses in turn influenced their attitudes. Results show that attitudes were influenced through recipients’ cognitive and emotional reactions to the stimuli but in opposite directions. This suppressed an overall effect on attitudes: Consuming humorous satirical messages led to more message-agreement because the messages were more humorous, and recipients felt less angry, while this consumption led to less message-agreement because the messages were discounted more, and recipients felt less worried. Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between different types of satirical news content (humorous vs. nonhumorous) when studying satire’s persuasiveness.

“Fake news you can trust”: How The Babylon Bee brings news satire to the Right

ABSTRACT The political Left dominated news satire in the United States in the early part of the 21st century with television shows such as The Daily Show and newspapers and sites like The Onion, leading some commentators and scholars to argue that satire leans inherently left or is even the exclusive domain of progressivism. Since 2016, The Babylon Bee, a conservative, Christian news satire website has defied these expectations. This article offers an examination of how The Babylon Bee, has adapted contemporary practices of news satire in the 21st century United States to the conservative perspective. After providing a theoretical definition of “conservative satire,” the paper provides brief historical overviews of news satire since the turn of the century, conservative satire from Ancient Greece to the British Enlightenment, and the founding and evolution of The Babylon Bee. Finally, the author demonstrates how The Bee has brought news satire to the Right in the 21st century by navigating three challenges of the recent American politics of particular importance to conservatives: the divisive figure of Donald Trump, the rise of misinformation, and the nuances of identity politics.

Liquid racism in Greek online satirical news

The present study explores the infiltration of racism in humorous texts which at first sight appear to have antiracist intentions, in particular in satirical news coming from popular Greek websites and targeting majority people for their racist practices towards migrants. The analysis reveals that distinguishing between antiracist and racist interpretations is not an easy or straightforward matter: humour seems to blur the boundary between racism and antiracism. In this context, the concept of liquid racism (Weaver, 2016) is exploited to account for the ambiguities of humorous discourse when it involves racist and antiracist meanings. Furthermore, given that this paper is part of a special issue on “Humour and the public sphere”, the latter understood in Habermas’s (1989/1962) sense, I will venture some observations concerning the (in)compatibility between Habermas’s conceptualisation of the public sphere and humour/satire. Perhaps a broader and more inclusive definition of the public sphere than the one initially proposed by Habermas is called for, which will allow for the ambiguities of satirical humour.

Contextualized Satire Detection in Short Texts Using Deep Learning Techniques

Satire is prominent in user-generated content on various online platforms in the form of satirical news, customer reviews, blogs, articles, and short messages that are typically of an informal nature. As satire is also used to disseminate false information on the Internet, its computational detection has become a well-known issue. Existing work focuses primarily on formal document- or sentence-level textual data, whereas informal short texts have gotten less attention for satire detection. This paper presents a new model called BiLSTM self-attention (BiSAT) for detecting satire in informal short texts. It consists of various components such as input, embedding, self-attention, and two bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) layers for learning crucial contextual information pertaining to the satire present in the texts. The input layer uses the text as input to create an input vector, which is then given to the embedding layer to create the appropriate numeric vector. The output of the embedding layer is passed on to the first BiLSTM layer, which extracts contextual information-based sequences in the opposite direction. Between the first and second BiLSTM layers, a self-attention layer is employed to draw attention to the important satirical information that is acquired by the hidden layer of the first BiLSTM. The BiSAT model also takes a classic feature engineering approach, employing a 13-dimensional auxiliary feature vector comprised of features from four separate feature categories: sentiment, punctuation, hyperbole, and affective. The proposed BiSAT model is empirically evaluated on two benchmark datasets and a newly created dataset called Satire-280. It outperforms existing research and baseline methods by a significant margin. The Satire-280 dataset along with code can be downloaded from GitHub repository: https://github.com/Ashraf-Kamal/Satire-Detection.

Mainstreaming and Weaponizing Satire in Nigerian Journalism Practice

Satire has gained increased scholarly traction across journalism and related fields. The genre increases the entertainment value of journalism and broadens its appeal. Satirical news also serves as a catalyst to pique the curiosity of ordinarily disinterested audiences in news, particularly political news. However, there are some concerns emerging from the weaponization of satire in this contemporary period, which is characterised by the proliferation of fake news and misinformation. From the Nigerian context, there have been minimal empirical spotlights placed on satirical journalism. We employed semi-structured interviews to explore the views of Nigerian print satirical journalists and cartoonists. Our finding broadens scholarship in the evolving area of satirical journalism. It demonstrates how the mainstreaming and the weaponization of satire have changed the texture of satire in Nigerian journalism. Although ethical concerns are admitted, we argue that cartoonists and satirical journalists have a responsibility to adjust to the dynamic media ecology, where satire continuously provides insightful critique and entertaining commentaries.

Between Headlines and Punchlines: Journalistic Role Performance in Western News Satire

ABSTRACT News satire has proliferated worldwide and has emerged as a valid site for public discourse. What we see today is a spectrum of news satire formats ranging from the predominantly absurd and comedic to more overtly journalistic satirical deconstructions of current affairs. This maturation of news satire as an alternative form of journalism thus underlines the necessity for further research into the journalistic roles that certain news satire formats carry out. This study assesses the journalistic roles in three international news satire formats i.e., the United States’ Last Week Tonight, the Swedish Svenska Nyheter, and the Dutch Zondag met Lubach and presents the findings of a content analysis of 150 satirical segments having aired from October 2020 to April 2023. We conclude that Western news satire displays a fairly united execution of journalistic role performances with high scores for the Advocate, Watchdog and Civic Educator roles, yet low scores for Reporter and Loyalist roles. Furthermore, we present the Comedic Interlocutor role, and discuss its place in alternative conceptions of professional journalism today. This study empirically validates that humor and entertainment are not irreconcilable with a factual, civically engaged, critical kind of journalistic coverage.

Moral Judgment and Social Critique in Journalistic News Satire

Journalistic news satire is a satire subgenre that is gaining legitimacy in academic research as well as in the journalistic field as an opinion news format and arena for public debate. News satirists claim journalistic roles and operate under the mandate of exposing moral wrongs and auditing power. The development of a more substantial news satire coincides with an observed repoliticization of humor and comedy and intensified moral negotiation around comedic content, particularly on social media. Based on the Moral Foundation Theory, this study identifies moral judgments in journalistic news satire, using a content analysis of TV news satire material from Sweden and the U.S. The results show an overwhelming majority of moral judgments related to the individualizing foundations of Harm and Fairness, while the binding foundations of Ingroup, Authority, and Purity were less frequent. In addition, the results show strong similarities between the two countries in the material, indicating moral common ground and displaying how moral judgment is connected to the inherent nature of satire in general and the genre conventions of journalistic news satire in particular.

Satirizing News Media, Changing Taiwan’s Feelings: The Night Night Show with Brian Tseng’s Adaptation of the American Satire News Format

The US television program The Daily Show has inspired creative talents worldwide to adapt the American political satire news formats to their own political environments. One example is The Night Night Show, hosted by Brian Tseng between 2018 and 2020 and produced by the STR Network from Taiwan. Instead of approaching the show as the result of the diffusion of the US cultural and political model into the rest of the world, this article contextualizes The Night Night Show’s adaptation of an American satirical news format in the Sinophone political discourse of laughter and satire in the modern history of Taiwan. It argues that while the show’s adaptation of an American satirical news format demonstrates how satire can dismantle linguistic and national boundaries as a transnational bonding force, it also brings this American format to critical scrutiny. In particular, the principal cultural understanding of news media as sensationalistic and propagandist instead of truthful in the local context contests the notions of “truthiness” central to the American satire news formats.

Mountain Gazelle Optimizer with Deep Learning Driven Satirical News Classification on Low-resource Language Corpus

The development of satirical and fake news on digital platforms has source of major concern about the spread of misinformation and its control on society. As part of the Arabic language, fake news detection (FND) shows particular problems because of language difficulties and the scarcity of labeled data. FND on Arabic corpus utilizing deep learning (DL) contains leveraging advanced neural network (NN) techniques and methods to automatically recognize and classify deceptive data in the Arabic language text. This procedure is vital in combating the spread of disinformation and misinformation, promoting media literacy, and make sure the credibility of data sources for the Arabic-speaking community. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are common selections for FND because of their capability for learning hierarchical features and model sequential data from the text. In this view, this study develops a Mountain Gazelle Optimizer with Deep Learning-Driven Fake News Classification on Arabic Corpus (MGODL-FNCAC) technique. The presented MGODL-FNCAC approach aims to increase the performance of the fake news classification on the Arabic corpus. Primarily, the MGODL-FNCAC technique involves different stages of pre-processing to make the input data compatible for classification. For fake news detection, the MGODL-FNCAC technique applies the deep belief network (DBN) model. At last, the MGO approach can be used for the better hyperparameter tuning of the DBN approach, which supports in enhancing the overall training process and detection rate. The simulation outcomes of the MGODL-FNCAC technique can be examined on Arabic corpus data. The extensive outcomes exhibit the importance of the MGODL-FNCAC system over other methodologies with maximum accuracy of 97.68% and 95.14% on Covid19Fakes and Satirical dataset, respectively.

Online Satirical News as Instances of Liquid Racism: Evidence from Greek

When discussing the relationship between humour and racism, research usually concentrates on ethnic or racist jokes or on other humorous texts which expressly target migrants or other minorities. Relevant studies more or less explicitly ascribe to critical humour studies investigating topics such as how and why humour targeting the linguistic, cultural, or religious Other reproduces and maintains social discrimination and inequality, as well as how and why the generic conventions of humorous genres do not incite the audience to think critically of their content but instead enhance their tolerance for discriminatory and racist standpoints. In this context, the present study explores humorous texts that at first sight appear to have antiracist intentions. More specifically, I analyse a corpus of satirical news coming from popular Greek websites and targeting majority people for their racist views and practices towards migrants. The analysis is based on the concepts of script opposition and target as defined in the framework of the General Theory of Verbal Humour. The findings suggest that distinguishing between antiracist and racist interpretations is not an easy or straightforward matter: humour seems to blur the boundary between racism and antiracism. In order to account for this dimension of humour, I exploit the concept of liquid racism put forward by Weaver (The Rhetoric of Racist Humour) to account for the ambiguities of humorous discourse when it involves racist and antiracist meanings and interpretations.

Comprehensive Study of Arabic Satirical Article Classification

A well-known issue for social media sites consists of the hazy boundaries between malicious false news and protected speech satire. In addition to the protective measures that lessen the exposure of false material on social media, providers of fake news have started to pose as satire sites in order to escape being delisted. Potentially, this may cause confusion to the readers as satire can sometimes be mistaken for real news, especially when their context or intent is not clearly understood and written in a journalistic format imitating real articles. In this research, we tackle the issue of classifying Arabic satiric articles written in a journalistic format to detect satirical cues that aid in satire classification. To accomplish this, we compiled the first Arabic satirical articles dataset extracted from real-world satirical news platforms. Then, a number of classification models that integrate a variety of feature extraction techniques with machine learning, deep learning, and transformers to detect the provenance of linguistic and semantic cues were investigated, including the first use of the ArabGPt model. Our results indicate that BERT is the best-performing model with F1-score reaching 95%. We also provide an in-depth lexical analysis of the formation of Arabic satirical articles. The lexical analysis provides insights into the satirical nature of the articles in terms of their linguistic word uses. Finally, we developed a free open-source platform that automatically organizes satirical and non-satirical articles in their correct classes from the best-performing model in our study, BERT. In summary, the obtained results found that pretrained models gave promising results in classifying Arabic satirical articles.

Assessment of bidirectional transformer encoder model and attention based bidirectional LSTM language models for fake news detection

Fake news arouses to be untrue with the point of deceiving it openly which is now viewed as the greatest threat to society by cultivating the political division and doubts in government. Since this kind of news is disseminated in sheer volume through social media, driving the improvement of strategies for the recognizable proof of false news is necessary. Therefore, this study focuses on text analytics to derive the hidden properties of stylistic content to detect fake and real news. An erudite literature study of fake news detection diverted towards issues such as attention, context, and parallelization. In this same direction, the assessment evaluates the sequential memory-based deep learning model in comparison to the parallel memory-based deep learning model. For sequential, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bi-Directional LSTM, and Attention-based Bi-directional LSTM are taken into consideration. Besides, for parallel, the transformer-based BERT model is examined. To identify the efficacy of applied approaches, four datasets are taken from diverse domains such as political news, entertainment news, satire news, conspiracy news, and global pandemic news. The experimental analysis of real-world information demonstrates that the pre-trained transformer encoder-based BERT model outperforms with a quite significant margin of improvement. Also, as inspected Attention-based Bi-directional approach provides state-of-the-art results with good training accuracy.

Relationship of media usage to attitudes toward police

ABSTRACT The present study examined the contribution of exposure to entertainment and news media to attitudes toward police. Using a survey of young adults (N = 321), various media repertoires as well as other contributory variables, such as race and political affiliation, were regressed on theoretically derived attitudes toward police. Significant major predictor variables included race (African Americans), political point of view (liberal) and liberal media news outlets such as CNN and news satire shows (“The Daily Show”), all significantly associated with negative attitudes toward police. More positive associations were found for exposure to mainstream local and national TV news outlets. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Contemporary political satirists

The conventional understanding of the church’s prophetic witness is that it is founded on the prophets portrayed in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. They communicated God’s message in relation to various issues such as religious practices and loyalty to God, but also, importantly, criticism and denunciation of political and social injustice. Satirical shows, in this study, refer to the satirical news components of TV late-night talk shows, as well as internet based satirical socio-political shows, where satirical commentary forms the common thread with prophetic witness, namely the indictment of political and social wrongdoing. Specific shows referred to in this study are The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Honest Government Ad, and Jonathan Pie. The angle of this paper differs from other studies in that it does not look at Christian/religious themes specifically, rather any issue warranting a prophetic voice, but which is often absent. The challenge addressed in this article is to see if a link between contemporary political satire and prophetic witness can be justified theologically. A cursory overview on satire in the book of Jonah as the most comprehensive representation of the genre within the prophets is done, as well as a discussion on possible prophetic themes and examples in a selection of political satire programmes. The study concludes that, while political satirists are not prophets, when interpreted in the context of God’s kingdom, they do at times speak prophetically.

Metaphorical Humor in Satirical News Shows: A Content Analysis

ABSTRACT Satirical news is often characterized as a hybrid genre that consists of three important communicative functions: it is (1) humoristic, (2) informative, and (3) evaluative. The Humoristic Metaphors in Satirical News (HMSN) typology demonstrates that metaphors can be utilized by satirists to express this hybridity by consisting of a combination of one or more of satire’s core communicative functions. Nevertheless, the underlying principles through which metaphors are capable of humorously explaining and/or criticizing current affairs are less clear. To broaden our understanding of how metaphorical humor is used in satirical news to fulfill these functions, we integrate the HMSN typology with the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH). The GTVH assumes that all verbal humor must draw from six interdependent Knowledge Resources (KRs). Through a content analysis of metaphorical humor used across various American satirical news shows, we investigated how these KRs are used to fulfill satire’s core communicative functions across the various metaphorical sub-types of the HSMN typology. We found that: (1) some KRs can help fulfill the communicative function(s) of metaphorical jokes, while (2) some KRs constrain the options available for the expression of certain communicative function(s) or other KRs.

Performing feminist research: creative tactics for communicating COVID-19, gender, and higher education research

ABSTRACT Presenting research findings outside of the form of a traditional research report requires different modes of making and communicating. This paper offers an account of how The #FEAS Report, a satirical news video, was made to communicate the findings from interviews and a survey as part of the mixed-methods study, Sexism, Higher Education, and COVID-19: The Australian Perspective to a wider public. Three creative tactics for research communication were used: DIY aesthetics, humour, and situated bodies. These communication tactics enabled the researchers to think differently about what research findings mean, and how to articulate them in ways that are intelligible. The paper shows how these tactics worked to bring findings to audiences beyond the academy and ask audiences within the academy to think differently about research reporting and knowledge communication. The paper considers how performing research in this way generates different conversations that compliment those started by more common ways of presenting research findings, and most importantly, how crucial it is for feminist researchers to make space for the creative within contemporary higher education.

An Overview of the Fake News Phenomenon: From Untruth-Driven to Post-Truth-Driven Approaches

“Fake news” was chosen in 2017 as the word of the year by the Collins Dictionary and the American Dialect Society, due to its extraordinary popularity. However, its relevance has been called into question due to its controversy and ambiguity. We have compiled herein 30 definitions from selected dictionaries, academic papers, news agencies, influential media observatories, and independent, certified fact-checkers over the last six years and have carried out a manual relational content analysis on them. We also collected data from four bibliometric studies from academic literature and five surveys on how the general public perceived fake news. In keeping with this three-level systematic review (lexicography, bibliometrics, and public perception) we detected some trends, including a growing drift towards a post-truth-driven conceptualization of fake news. Results also show that the “viral” and “memetic” quality of a rumor prevail over the demonstrable credibility of a source and even the factuality of a reported event; the element of surprise or outrage in the heat of the moment is more powerful than the ironic detachment elicited by news satire and parody; and sharing motivations are definitely less concerned with perceived accuracy than with partisan support, community sentiment, emotional contagion, and a taste for the sensational or bizarre.