<i>The Rally to Restore Sanity</i>, Prepoliticization, and the Future of Politics

Reilly, Ian; Boler, Megan

doi:10.1111/cccr.12057

Cited by 13 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 11 publications

(8 reference statements)

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“…Another dimension of the public agenda is the actual civil action that follows from media attention. Infotainment has shown to make political issues so important in the public eye, that it encouraged more than 200,000 people to physically attend the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear organized by satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (Reilly & Boler, 2014). Undertaking such acts of political participation is an indicator of the public agenda, because citizens will only invest the effort, time, and resources if they deem a topic important enough.…”

Section: Satire and The Public Agendamentioning

confidence: 99%

Agenda-Setting With Satire: How Political Satire Increased TTIP’s Saliency on the Public, Media, and Political Agenda

Boukes¹

2018

Political Communication

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Agenda-setting has mostly been investigated as the cognitive process set in motion by the salience of political issues in the traditional news media. The question, though, remained whether political entertainment shows-political satire, specifically-can also set the agenda. The current study investigates whether two episodes of Dutch satire show Zondag met Lubach (ZML) about the European Union-United States trade agreement Transatlantic Trade Investment and Partnership (TTIP) have triggered first-level agendasetting effects. For that purpose, three studies have been conducted to investigate the threestep agenda-setting process (i.e., learning, understanding, acting) from saliency in satire to saliency on the public agenda, but also on the media and political agenda. Study 1: A twowave panel survey shows that consumption of the satire show positively affected knowledge acquisition about TTIP, which is the first step in the cognitive process underlying agendasetting. Study 2: A randomized experiment demonstrated that exposure to ZML increased the perceived understanding of TTIP, which subsequently had a positive impact on the saliency of TTIP on the public agenda. Study 3: Longitudinal time-series data provide evidence that the saliency of TTIP on the public agenda-short term-and on the political agenda-long term-were positively affected by the ZML satire episodes. The study, altogether, demonstrates satire's ability to set the agenda of both the individual and aggregate level and emphasizes the persistent relevance of agenda-setting theory in today's high-choice media environment.

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Section: Satire and The Public Agendamentioning

confidence: 99%

Agenda-Setting With Satire: How Political Satire Increased TTIP’s Saliency on the Public, Media, and Political Agenda

Boukes¹

2018

Political Communication

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“…Studies within the realm of inoculation theory have shown that satire encourages subsequent thinking about political issues and motivates political discussion (for an overview, see Compton, 2018). Satire, for example, has inspired people to attend a rally for the first time (Reilly & Boler, 2014), to make donations (Day, 2013) or to actively share its content (Baym & Shah, 2011). Moreover, different underlying mechanisms have been identified through which satire may cause engagement -potentially also in the form of user-content interactivity: Satire might stimulate this via an affective path by evoking negative emotions (Chen, Gan, & Sun, 2017;Lee & Kwak, 2014) as well as via a cognitive path due to an increased sense of efficacy (Hoffman & Thomson, 2009;Hoffman & Young, 2011).…”

Section: Influence Of News Genre On User-content Interactivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing user-content interactivity and audience diversity across news and satire: differences in online engagement between satire, regular news and partisan news

Boukes¹,

Chu²,

Noon³

et al. 2021

Journal of Information Technology & Politics

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Normative theory on the functioning of the public sphere requires citizens to actively engage with the information that is provided to them. For a long time, however, the possibilities of user-content interactivity have been limited due to the one-directionality of the traditional mass media. Moreover, a re-occurring question is to what extent less-versus-more entertaining forms of news evoke audience engagement. This study analyzes the user-content engagement on online platforms in response to journalistic content and infotainment; more concretely, we compare whether the satire genre is more likely to evoke user-content interactivity than regular news and partisan news shows. To test our hypotheses, a large-scale data analysis of social media posts by a wide variety of American TV shows on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter has been conducted. Results demonstrate satire's potential to encourage user-content interactivity: Satire videos generated (a) more likes and (b) more comments than the clips of regular news. However, we also find that (c) satire videos are related to less controversy, which arguably indicates that satire hampers the exchange of diverse ideas. Compared to partisan news -which shares many features of satire, but often lacks the humor component -satire elicits more likes but less commentary and less controversy.

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“…Sørensen (2016) has divided these stunts into five types: supportive, corrective, naïve, absurd, and provocative, depending on their relationship with the target of the protest. Researchers have suggested that political humor by activists can mobilize people and serve as a gateway to further civic engagement (Halabi, 2017; Reilly and Boler, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clowning around a polarized issue: Rhetorical strategies and communicative outcomes of a political parody performance by Loldiers of Odin

Laaksonen¹,

Koivukoski

Porttikivi

2021

New Media & Society

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For decades, political activist groups have used humor for ridiculing their opponents and attracting media attention. This study analyzed the online presence of the Loldiers of Odin, a clown-disguised activist group created as a parody of the anti-immigration group Soldiers of Odin. By analyzing the rhetorical strategies of Loldiers’ performance, we show how absurd and naïve parody stunts were used to criticize anti-immigration street patrolling, distort radical right-wing discourses, and mobilize like-minded progressives. Furthermore, by analyzing Facebook commentary of the performance, we trace its communicative outcomes: support and legitimization, but also problematization and delegitimization. Our results highlight the unpredictable and ambivalent nature of humor in facilitating a political protest. We argue that while humor offers a compelling way for citizens to discursively engage with political issues such as the immigration question, the polysemic nature of parody paradoxically works to amplify and support existing polarized positions in online discussions.

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The Rally to Restore Sanity, Prepoliticization, and the Future of Politics

Cited by 13 publications

References 11 publications

Agenda-Setting With Satire: How Political Satire Increased TTIP’s Saliency on the Public, Media, and Political Agenda

Agenda-Setting With Satire: How Political Satire Increased TTIP’s Saliency on the Public, Media, and Political Agenda

Comparing user-content interactivity and audience diversity across news and satire: differences in online engagement between satire, regular news and partisan news

Clowning around a polarized issue: Rhetorical strategies and communicative outcomes of a political parody performance by Loldiers of Odin

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