In this book, Curt Hersey explores the history of U.S. media, demonstrating how news parody has entertained television audiences by satirizing political and social issues and offering a lighthearted take on broadcast news. Despite shifts away from broadcast and cable delivery, comedians like Samantha Bee, Michael Che, and John Oliver continue this tradition of delivering topical humor within a newscast format. In this history of the television news parody genre, Hersey critically engages with the norms and presentational styles of television journalism at the time of their production. News parody has increasingly become part of the larger journalistic field, with viewers often turning to this parodic programming as a supplement and corrective to mainstream news sources. Beginning in the 1960s with the NBC program That Was the Week That Was, the history of news parody is analyzed decade by decade by focusing on presidential and political coverage, as well as the genre’s critiques of television network and cable journalism. Case studies include Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update;” HBO’s Not Necessarily the News; Comedy Central’s original Daily Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Colbert Report; and HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Scholars of media history, political communication, and popular culture will find this book particularly useful.

This work examines what happens when comedy becomes political, and politics become funny. A series of original essays focus on a range of programmes, from 'The Daily Show' to 'South Park'.

This book provides the first history of the television news parody genre, analyzing how these shows have functioned as critiques of television news, politics, culture, and American society, while entertaining and informing audiences. Each chapter features a case study and discussion of the genre during a particular decade.

"Television History, The Peabody Archive, and Cultural Memory is the product of a multiyear collaboration between the Peabody Awards program and over a dozen media scholars with the intent to uncover, explore, and analyze historical television programming contained in the Peabody Awards archives at the University of Georgia. It is an intentional effort to look both wider and deeper than the well-known canon of U.S. broadcast history that dominates popular memory of the relationship of television to American society. The Peabody Archive is especially suited to this project because it is an archive of programming produced and submitted not just by the big networks in New York or Los Angeles, but by stations and media producers across the nation and, more recently, around the world. This project asks, how might these programs change our understanding of television's past, and impact the ways we think about television's present and future? What new questions can we ask and what new approaches should we take as a result of seeing and experiencing this programming? The contributions in this volume offer a dramatic range of approaches for how scholars can productively engage the archive's media and physical holdings to examine and reconsider television history"--

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.

This book examines fake news in the digital information age, as well as its impact on society, especially in education, politics, and public policy.

In a time of global infotainment, the crisis of modern journalism, the omnipresence of celebrity culture and reality TV, and the colonization of public discourse by media spectacle and entertainment, postmodern satiric media have emerged as prominent critical voices playing an unprecedented role at the heart of public debate. Indeed, satiric media has filled gaps left not only by traditional media but also by weak social institutions and discredited political elites. In Satiric TV in the Americas, Paul Alonso analyzes the most influential satiric TV shows in the Americas--focusing on shows in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Chile and the United States--in order to understand their critical role in challenging the status quo, traditional journalism, and the prevalent local media culture. Alonso illuminates the phenomenon of satire as resistance and negotiation in public discourse, the role of entertainment media as a site where socio-political tensions are played out, and the changing notions of journalism in today's democratic societies. Introducing the notion of "critical metatainment" -- a transgressive, self-referential reaction to the process of tabloidization and the cult of celebrity in the media spectacle era -- Satiric TV in the Americas is the first book to map, contextualize, and analyze relevant cases to understand the relation between political information, social and cultural dissent, critical humor, and entertainment in the region. Evaluating contemporary satiric media as a consequence of the collapse of modernity and its arbitrary dichotomies, Satiric TV in the Americas also shows that, as satiric formats travel to a particular national context, they are appropriated in different ways and adapted to local circumstances, with distinct consequences.