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Political Satire And Political News: Entertaining, Accidentally Reporting Or Both? The Case Of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart (Tds), Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

For the last decade, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (TDS), a (Comedy Central) cable comedy show, has been increasingly seen as an informative, new, even revolutionary, form of journalism. A substantial body of literature appeared, adopting this view. On closer inspection, it became clear that this view was tenable only in specific circumstances. It assumed that the comedic structure of the show, TDS' primary text, promoted cognitive polysemy, a textual ambiguity which encouraged critical inquiry, and that TDS' audiences perceived it accordingly. As a result I analyzed, through a dual - encoding/decoding - analytical approach, whether TDS' comedic discourse …