From The Daily Show to Last Week Tonight: A quantitative analysis of discursive integration in satirical television news

Britta C. Brugman; Christian Burgers; Camiel J. Beukeboom; Elly A. Konijn

doi:10.1080/1461670X.2021.1929416

From The Daily Show to Last Week Tonight: A quantitative analysis of discursive integration in satirical television news

Britta C. Brugman^*, Christian Burgers, Camiel J. Beukeboom, Elly A. Konijn

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

Satirical news shows constitute an innovative hybrid genre that mixes regular news and fiction. The discursive integration hypothesis posits that the defining characteristic of satirical news shows is that news and fiction elements are integrated such that boundaries between the preexisting genres have blurred. The current study quantitatively tests this hypothesis on both long-running American shows such as The Daily Show and more recent shows such as Last Week Tonight. We collected transcripts of fifteen satirical news shows, eleven regular news shows, and fourteen fiction shows from 2018 (9,824,249 words). Transcripts were automatically tagged for over fifty linguistic features to identify register dimensions, patterns in linguistic features unique to genres, which we used to determine the presence of discursive integration. Findings revealed that two-thirds of satirical news shows were indeed characterized by discursive integration (which we labeled “complete hybrids”), while one-third manifested through the already existing hybrid genre of opinionated news (which we labeled “hybrid-genre echoes”). These two categories of shows demonstrate the importance of genre hybridity for defining satirical news across different shows.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1181-1199
Number of pages	19
Journal	Journalism Studies
Volume	22
Issue number	9
Early online date	25 May 2021
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2021.1929416
Publication status	Published - 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The research in this paper was supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) [grant number 276-45-005]. We would like to thank Bob Brugman for his assistance in collecting the transcripts.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Funding

The research in this paper was supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) [grant number 276-45-005]. We would like to thank Bob Brugman for his assistance in collecting the transcripts.

Keywords

discursive integration
hybrid genre
journalism
linguistic register
political satire
Satirical news

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1080/1461670X.2021.1929416

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abstract = "Satirical news shows constitute an innovative hybrid genre that mixes regular news and fiction. The discursive integration hypothesis posits that the defining characteristic of satirical news shows is that news and fiction elements are integrated such that boundaries between the preexisting genres have blurred. The current study quantitatively tests this hypothesis on both long-running American shows such as The Daily Show and more recent shows such as Last Week Tonight. We collected transcripts of fifteen satirical news shows, eleven regular news shows, and fourteen fiction shows from 2018 (9,824,249 words). Transcripts were automatically tagged for over fifty linguistic features to identify register dimensions, patterns in linguistic features unique to genres, which we used to determine the presence of discursive integration. Findings revealed that two-thirds of satirical news shows were indeed characterized by discursive integration (which we labeled “complete hybrids”), while one-third manifested through the already existing hybrid genre of opinionated news (which we labeled “hybrid-genre echoes”). These two categories of shows demonstrate the importance of genre hybridity for defining satirical news across different shows.",

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From The Daily Show to Last Week Tonight: A quantitative analysis of discursive integration in satirical television news

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

UN SDGs

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