Producing Journalistic News Satire: How Nordic Satirists Negotiate a Hybrid Genre

ABSTRACT

Political satire is an elusive hybrid genre that through its evolution over the past two decades has gained both media and scholarly interest. Inspired by American TV shows like Last Week Tonight, a new wave of more journalistic news satire has spread across the world. Studies have scrutinized its contents and effects, but the production side has remained largely uncovered. This study applies the concepts of genre and boundary work to analyze how advocates of this practice relate themselves to news journalism and previous satire. Based on qualitative interviews with 16 key production team members of four topical satire programs, we investigate how Nordic news satirists interpret their aims and work routines. We argue that both Finnish and Swedish news satirists embrace some of the traditional values of journalism such as striving for factuality, political relevance, and monitoring the powerful while they simultaneously aim for more emotional, opinionated, and exaggerated expression than in regular news reporting. The implications of this hybrid, “neomodern” ethos are examined.

KEYWORDS:

• Satire
• infotainment
• comedy
• interview studies
• political humor
• hybridity

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Joonas Koivukoski http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8997-4498

Sara Ödmark http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3015-7423

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation under the grant 00180538; Suomen Kulttuurirahasto.