Satire and Punditry

Satire has a long history of presenting current events to wide audiences. You can go all the way back to Juvenal in the second century and his poems actually called the Satires. He was trying to illustrate life and the things he disliked about Rome at the time. He might name a deceased individual to highlight vices of the time knowing that the reader would be able to make their own connections to current events (Courtney, 2013). It continues through time to pundit authors like Jonathan Swift using simplification and exaggeration for clarity.

Compared to satire, the concept of ethics and standards in journalism is a very modern way of thinking. Ward (2005) writes that its only in the "early 1900s" that newspapers positioned to themselves to the public as unbiased arbiters of the news (2005, pp. 4). Punditry and blogging can vary widely in where they sit on the spectrum of methodical analysis and presentation of facts to comedic flair and how approachable they are.

If you look at a show like The Daily Show, the core conceit of the individual segments are each based on a researched facts. A study examining coverage of the 2004 election by The Daily Show and by broadcast television news networks concluded they were equally substantive, and the coverage by The Daily Show helped younger viewers answer more political questions correctly (Fox et al, 2007).

My personal experience with pundits from individual bloggers to the The Daily Show is when the authors present a good narrative, even with exaggeration and ridicule, they are relying on the readers to understand the commentary and dig deeper into an issue that they might have ignored in a dry presentation. A reliable independent blogger like Marcy Wheeler can be more factual in the long term than a Jayson Blair or Sabrina Erdely who have the entire institutions of the New York Times or Rolling Stone behind them.

References

Courtney, E. (2013). A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4jh846pn

Fox, J. R., Koloen, G., & Sahin, V. (2007). No Joke: A Comparison of Substance inThe Daily Show withJon Stewartand Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 51(2), 213–227. doi:10.1080/08838150701304621 

Ward, S. J. A. (2005). Philosophical Foundations for Global Journalism Ethics. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 20(1), 3–21. doi:10.1207/s15327728jmme2001_2