How does satire affect people

The importance of satire occurs at key points in history, usually when the mass of common people gets fed up with the nonsense being fed to them by politicians, political pundits, inane celebrities and the very rich.

However, if you think satire in the news is just mere entertainment, you might want to reassess your beliefs. Study conducted by The Ohio State University has shown that satirical news has real effects on people who consume them, just like regular, fact-based news.

The research examined satire in programs such as The Daily Show and tried to measure its impact on the study participants. It turns out that satire has the power to reinforce our existing political viewpoints and even influence the way we feel about the possibility of personally impacting political processes.

Others take things even further, believing that satirical news plays a key role in shaping the next generation of American citizens. Such is the viewpoint of Penn State researcher Sophia McClennen , who believes that young people in particular turn to The Daily Show or Colbert Report and treat them as credible news sources that offer critical reflection in addition to the facts — which makes them engaging and ultimately empowers them to think on their own.

Many still do, because the line between satire and deliberate misinformation tends to get a bit blurry. The difference between satire and fake news has even inspired a real group of researchers at the University of Maryland to take a closer look.

They used a dataset of fake news stories and satirical news that are hand coded and verified, and then conducted content analysis in order to identify major themes and determine the main differences between the two. The research defines fake news in the following way:. Fake news is information, presented as a news story that is factually incorrect and designed to deceive the consumer into believing it is true.

Both fake news and satirical news are untrue, but the key difference lies in the intention. Fake news is created with the deliberate intention to mislead and are by nature maliciously deceptive.

While satire relies on factually incorrect stories, it intends to ridicule and expose behavior that is shameful. That is what Colbert does very effectively on camera. I think his Super-PAC has been highly successful at doing this.

It seems to me that this is not the kind of reaction we would have if he was just talking about Super-PACs in a monologue on the show.

The election was different, where we saw incredible political satire and the classic Tina Fey caricature of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. This very brief, funny, cartoonish skit actually conveyed a huge amount of the complicated truth about how we perceive gender and power. Hillary Clinton had been in the public eye with intense gender scrutiny about her looks and sexuality for nearly two decades, and then Sarah Palin came in and became a big superstar.

There are a lot of different kinds of satire nowadays. Satire continues to play the traditional role it has for centuries, which is to critique not only the establishment but any sort of authority, often including media. People today feel that society is very egalitarian, but at the same time politics and the media seem run by shadowy interests, so satire is a way for people to vent about that.

One interesting thing is the live tweet phenomenon, where people watching debates, speeches or live events chime in on them together and riff off each other. Sometimes there are gross oversimplifications, but satire can be a great arrow in the quiver of dissent. Remember Laugh-In? That show was so brave and so funny and so relevant, and honestly, I think it could pat itself on the back for at least a portion of the wave that ended the Vietnam War.

And they fought hard with the censors, who used to drink at a bar across the street from the studio.

I think they would come away from Laugh-In and just be so exhausted from the struggle of trying to be the censor, that they would just have to go get liquored up. It really was a very courageous show. Satire can be a way of expressing the truth in the most blunt and accessible way: You are unrestrained and unburdened by the gravitas of supposedly being objective. The facade of humor lets you state a truth while not being subject to attack for being unfair. Gene Weingarten is a humor columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning feature article writer for The Washington Post.

Politics can be depressing—the level of deception and the lack of new ideas—so the ability to laugh at it makes it more bearable. Barack Obama was essentially on a stand-up comedy tour in the final two weeks of the campaign, and jokes were an important part of his stump speech. Because of Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc.

During the debates, Twitter became the bleachers with everyone yammering at the same time. But now you can say anything without asking for permission.

Baratunde Thurston was director of digital for The Onion before launching the startup, Cultivated Wit. His book is How To Be Black. One of the most palatable ways of getting a point across is through humor. People always want to be around the funny person.

It is such a powerful position to be in. But he poked fun at himself—he beat you to it. How can you not like a person like that? The paradox is this - if satire aims at the moral reform of a given society it can only be effective within that particular society, and, furthermore, only if there's a commonly accepted ethical hierarchy to begin with. A satire that demands of the entire world that it observe the same secularist values as the French state is a form of imperialism like any other.

Satire can be employed as a tactical weapon, aimed at a particular group in society in relation to a given objectionable practice - but like all tactical weapons it must be very well targeted indeed. A satire that aims to afflict the comfortable in other societies requires the same sort of commitment to nation-building as an invasion of another country that's predicated on replacing one detestable regime with another more acceptable one.

The problem for satire is thus that while we live in a globalized world so far as media is concerned, we don't when it comes to morality. Nor, I venture to suggest, will we ever. It's difficult to understand the attacks in Paris - but the caricaturist's craft offers a means of doing so, says Adam Gopnik.

January Image source, AP. This description of journalism was coined by the Chicago-based humorist Finley Peter Dunne , who put the words into the mouth of a fictional Irish bartender, Mr Dooley - "Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward. Image source, Getty Images.

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