MDIA 318 Media, Satire & Citizenship
The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen the growing prominence and influence of satirical media outlets such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Onion, and Politically Incorrect. Comic political videos have become commonplace, parodies such as those on Saturday Night Live have gone memic, and politicians obligingly take to the air on entertainment TV programs. MDIA318 examines this phenomenon in the broader historical contexts of political satire and the rhetoric of humor, addressing questions about its contemporary functions, its relation to the dominance of traditional news media and practices of partisan news and talk outlets, and controversy over whether "fake news" and "infotainment" serve or harm democratic civic culture.