“Focus Your Indiscriminate Rage in a Useful Direction”: Understanding Audience Engagement and Participation in the News Satire Genre

Abstract

This project aims to study the generic characteristics of current news satire on television, focusing on how audiences interact with this genre in order to learn more about audiences’ expectations and responses to these programs and how that influences the shows, and thus the genre itself. I hypothesize that this interaction of programs and audiences plays an essential role in the genre’s rhetorical shaping and success. In order to reveal this, I will look at the history of news satire in the United States from a rhetorical perspective, building to focus on some of the televised news satire programs airing today. Looking to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as programs with audience-centered conventions, I will argue that these shows in particular influenced subsequent iterations of the genre that hold a significant focus on engaging active audience uptake, taking the genre beyond a hybrid of comedy and news. Through a study of hashtags on Twitter associated with Last Week Tonight, I will then think about the ways in which these generic changes to news satire have manifested impact and effect on the world, reinforcing calls to action as a developing convention of the news satire genre. Finally, I will examine a controversial incident from Full Frontal with Samantha Bee to examine how audiences emerge through media coverage of the show that presents a limited view not only of the show, but of its genre; the intent of this case study is to complicate the notion of audience interaction with news satire, considering what happens when additional audiences emerge. Overall, it is my goal in this project to examine how the news satire genre has evolved to encourage audience action, what kinds of action might be possible through the genre, and how audiences’ genre expectations influence the genre itself. This project combines work from rhetoric and composition in genre and audience to the genre of news satire, which is most commonly viewed through the lens of media studies or communications. Scholars in these fields have taken up the study of news satire to examine its effects on audience knowledge and civic participation, but little has been done from a rhetorical standpoint to understand how audiences engage with news satire and how the genre has changed over time as a result of creator and audience interactions. This project contributes to knowledge in rhetoric and composition about activist audiences formed around a media genre that has not yet been thoroughly examined within the field.