Can Comedy/Satire News make change?
We live in a day and age of intense mediatization that provided us with the ease of making anything and everything public and possibly political. To further pursue this, one can’t make a public change before ensuring that said change must be – in a way or another – made public; that is communicating an issue in a manner that reaches as many people as possible and call for their action. Keeping this in mind, comedy news is more likely to cause change due to its broad audience and the ‘potential for viewers to watch videos from satirical news programs online expands their reach even further’ (Brewer & McKnight, 2017).
Furthermore, ‘a substantial proportion of audience members for satirical television news programs consume them primarily to be entertained rather than informed’ and that means that satire can not only reach publicly aware people, but also those who are nonchalant to public issues (Brewer & McKnight, 2017). For example, John Oliver made a segment on his show regarding climate change and studies were made to test his influence and there were some interesting findings. Firstly, a growing research showed that ‘exposure to satirical television news can influence audience members’ knowledge’ and ‘that exposure to a clip…. affirming the existence of climate change led viewers to report greater belief in global warming (Brewer & McKnight, 2017). Moreover, satirical programs such as Last Week Tonight may be particularly effective in promoting recognition of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change among less attentive citizens’ (Brewer & McKnight, 2017). As per this, the impact of satire might be even more life-altering than anticipated! Furthermore, satirical television news programs can promote greater engagement with scientific issues such as climate change (Brewer & McKnight, 2017). Yet, the results yielded no evidence that partisanship moderated the impact of the segment on viewers, so this suggests that viewers did not engage in motivated reasoning in response to satirical consensus messaging (Brewer & McKnight, 2017).
In conclusion, with respect to this study’s findings, comedy news can affect the perception of its viewers of public issues. As such, ‘such programs offer a potentially promising alternative route to traditional news media for communicating’ about multiple matters (Brewer & McKnight, 2017). Also, they have the ability to reach uninterested audiences and provide them with important information in an entertaining way. Overall, this post barely covers all the ways satire news are changing our understanding of the world around us, but it’s a start!
Bibliography
Brewer, P. R. & McKnight, J., 2017. “A Statistically Representative Climate Change Debate”:Satirical Television News, Scientific Consensus, and Public Perceptions of Global Warming” . Atlantic Journal of Communication, vol.25(no.3), pp. pp.166 – 180.