Satirical Television News Programs
My favorite part of Saturday Night Live has always been "The Weekend Update". I always found it to be the most consistently funny and socially relevant part of the show. When Comedy Central began airing The Daily Show and more recently, The Colbert Report (both Ts are silent), I became an immediate fan. Like "The Weekend Update", I find The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to discuss the daily news in a biting and entertaining manner, which I find quite amusing and often educational. It’s great to know that I will always laugh out loud as well as learn something every time I watch one of those shows. Therefore, my choice of genre for this week’s assignment is the satirical news show.
My favorite part of Saturday Night Live has always been "The Weekend Update". I always found it to be the most consistently funny and socially relevant part of the show. When Comedy Central began airing The Daily Show and more recently, The Colbert Report (both Ts are silent), I became an immediate fan. Like "The Weekend Update", I find The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to discuss the daily news in a biting and entertaining manner, which I find quite amusing and often educational. It’s great to know that I will always laugh out loud as well as learn something every time I watch one of those shows. Therefore, my choice of genre for this week’s assignment is the satirical news show.
For those of you unfamiliar with these programs, comedycentral.com desribes The Daily Show as "…a reality-based look at news, trends, pop culture, current events, politics, sports and entertainment with an alternative point of view" and The Colbert Report as "What The Daily Show is to evening news, The Colbert Report is to personality-driven pundit shows. Colbert brings his sarcastic charm to a half-hour report, tackling the important issues of the day and telling his guests why their opinions are just plain wrong" (comedycentral.com, 2007).
I tried to go through the Formalist/Structuralist approach as described in Beach’s book (and website) to describe the typical format of these satirical news shows.
Roles: Anchor and correspondents.
Settings: News station studio (but in front of a live audience) with occasional clips of interviews and correspondents reporting "at the scene".
Imagery and Symbols: The anchors and correspondents are always dressed professionally, usually in suits. The anchor sits behind a large desk. Often the colors red, white and blue are used in the studio, perhaps to convey patriotism.
Plot/Storyline: The shows follow similar formats of what we would normally see on an evening news show. The anchor tells us about national and world news, sometimes there are stories about pop culture and fads and sometimes there are taped interviews and reports from correspondents. The one major difference in these satirical news shows is that, unlike the typical evening news show, there is always a live interview between the anchor and a special guest.
Themes/Value Assumptions: These shows comment on many social and political issues and are often critical of the ways in which the mainstream media reports the news.
Apparently, with the popularity of The Daily Show, and the hits conservatives tend to take on it, Fox has recently started airing a satirical news show of its own, called 1/2 Hour News Hour. I don’t watch Fox news and just recently heard about this show, so I haven’t had the chance to review it. Unfortunately, Fox’s website doesn’t offer any information about the show or the characters. I’ve read mixed reviews of this show on the internet, and based on these initial reviews, it doesn’t look like this show will be as popular as The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. But I could be wrong…
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