“Find Out Exactly What to Think—Next!”: Chris Morris, Brass Eye, and Journalistic Authority

Abstract

This article discusses Chris Morris's fake news TV series Brass Eye (1997, 2001). It concentrates on the ways in which Brass Eye exposed and undermined not only the textual conventions of TV news and current affairs but also the ways in which the program deployed those textual conventions to highlight and sabotage the cultural authority of public figures who appeared on it. The article first introduces Morris and Brass Eye, before identifying some of the key textual strategies of broadcast news that are satirized in the program, including its mode of address, its music, and its visuals and graphics. It then examines how the program's use of those strategies enables it to exercise the authority of broadcast news to expose the accessed voices of public figures within the show.