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.

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.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report have attracted much interest in recent years from popular audiences as well as scholars in various disciplines. Both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have been named on Time magazine's list of the most influential people in the world. The ten essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the issues engendered by the popularity of entertainment news, including the role of satire in politics, the declining level of trust in traditional sources of media, the shows' cathartic or informational function, and the ways in which these shows influence public opinion. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

This book is an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon of the takeover of politics by entertainment. The author looks for answers in the parallel evolution of satire, the media, and politics, and how each has influenced the other and the implications of this interconnectedness for political discourse.

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'.

Satire is clearly one of today’s most controversial socio-cultural topics. In this edited volume, The Power of Satire, it is studied for the first time as a dynamic, discursive mode of performance with the power of crossing and contesting cultural boundaries. The collected essays reflect the fundamental shift from literary satire or straightforward literary rhetoric with a relatively limited societal impact, to satire’s multi-mediality in the transnational public space where it can cause intercultural clashes and negotiations on a large scale. An appropriate set of heuristic themes – space, target, rhetoric, media, time – serves as the analytical framework for the investigations and determines the organization of the book as a whole. The contributions, written by an international group of experts with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, manifest academic standards with a balance between theoretical analyses and evaluations on the one hand, and in-depth case studies on the other.