258 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 3  September 2012
Satirical Fake News and/as
American Political Discourse
Ian Reilly
Over the past decade, satirical fake news has
emerged as a ubiquitous form of popular political
discourse that questions, above all else, the logic
and integrity of contemporary journalistic prac-
tices. Through various manifestations, satirical
fake news has incited a much-needed reevaluation
of journalism’s relationship to politics and civic
culture. As Jeffrey P. Jones observes in Entertain-
ing Politics: Satiric Television and Political
Engagement, critical discussions of emergent
forms of satire like fake news (Jones’ terminol-
ogy) have appeared in large part due to “a funda-
mental change in political communication in
America” (7). Whereas entertainment television
has traditionally shied away from the “serious”
realm of politics (only occasionally exploring
political themes and subjects), politics now forms
an integral part of entertainment programming.
This shift, Jones argues, has been instrumental in
blurring the boundaries between serious and
entertaining discourse(s), placing politics squarely
(and perhaps uncomfortably) at the center of new
debates surrounding the function and value of
entertainment in civic culture. It is important to
illuminate the formal and rhetorical elements fake
news deploys in its sustained critiques of news
media, devices that have significantly enabled
political satirists to reframe the representation of
meaningful issues in the public sphere. This pro-
cess of re-presentation functions through the
form’s juxtaposition of factual and fictional ele-
ments, a process that highlights the discrepancies,
Ian Reilly holds a Ph.D. in literary studies from the University of Guelph. He is an assistant professor in the communication studies
department at Concordia University in Montréal.
The Journal of American Culture, 35:3
© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
omissions, and general flaws in logic that mark
everyday news reportage.
The Iraq War and the 2008
American Presidential Election
To crystallize my argument, this essay exam-
ines fake news’ re-presentation of political dis-
course through two critical frames, the Iraq War
and the 2008 American presidential election,
issues heavily reported in mainstream news media
that continue to attract significant attention from
various scholars. Recent scholarship on the Iraq
War addresses a number of disparate issues: news
coverage and propaganda (Dimaggio 2009;
Melkote 2009; Moeller 2004;), politics/political
theory (Hallenberg & Karlsson 2005; Lee 2010;
Žižek 2004), democratic politics (Danchev &
MacMillan 2005), feminist critique (Jeffreys 2007;
Oliver 2007; Sjoberg 2006), human casualties
(Burnham 2006), narrative (Ringmar 2006), capi-
talism (Klein 2007), and economics (Stiglitz &
Bilmes 2008), to cite but a few. Elsewhere, schol-
arship on the 2008 presidential election has
explored issues related to race (Sinclair-Chapman
& Price 2008), gender (Whitaker 2008; Lawrence
& Rose 2010), social change (Harlow 2009), polit-
ical campaigning and advertising (Panagopoulos
2009), campaign financing reform (see Lessig’s
Change Congress), education (Carter 2011),
 Satirical Fake News  Ian Reilly
economics (Halcoussis et al. 2009), and social
media (Hendricks & Denton 2010).
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these
two separate phenomena deserve examination
because these issues consistently appear in a broad
range of satirical fake news examples. Examples
here come almost exclusively from The Onion
and The Daily Show due in large part to their pro-
lific output and strong emphasis on these two
issues.1 The following discussion of these highly
charged political events highlights how satirical
fake news coverage shifts and expands the repre-
sentation of larger sets of issues in the public
sphere. Satirical fake news narratives add critical
complexity to dominant forms of political dis-
course through their reflexive engagement with
contemporary journalism. The following essay
examines how political satirists challenge and
subvert the codes and conventions of traditional
journalism through a number of satiric, ironic,
and parodic appropriations, in the interests of
revealing the inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and
failures of mainstream media reportage.
“Bush Quietly Rolls Back Iraq
Death Toll To Zero”
In June 2006, the New York Times reported that
George W. Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq in
the express interests of urging the war-torn coun-
try’s newly-assembled government to “[s]eize the
opportunity to develop a government of, and by,
and for [sic] the people” (Burns and Filkins). The
story also reports that during his six-hour visit the
president pledged the United States’ ongoing com-
mitment to assist the Iraqi government in curbing
sectarian violence and in rebuilding its shattered
infrastructure. Two weeks later, The Onion pub-
lished its own account of the president’s surprise
visit, arguing that his presence in Iraq was news-
worthy but for entirely different reasons. In an
AP-style news brief, The Onion created a false
headline that fictionalized the total absence of
combat deaths in Iraq, describing Bush’s success in
quietly rolling back the Iraq death toll to zero.
259
Here the disparity between the fictionalized num-
ber of deaths reported by military officials (zero)
and the actual number of dead American soldiers
(2,500) serves as an important reminder of the
human costs of war. Importantly, the story’s pub-
lication came at a time when anxieties surrounding
growing death tolls in the region were deepening
on both sides of the political divide. This example,
therefore, sheds light on how irony functions
within a given satirical fake news text.
In its deployment of irony, The Onion story
recounts General George W. Casey Jr.’s mistaken
report that the number of soldiers killed on the
battlefield had been significantly higher prior to
Bush’s surprise visit:
I could have sworn that almost 2,500 American ser-
vicemen and women had sacrificed their lives in this
theater of operation, but the death toll counter here in
my office read ‘zero’ this morning, and that’s what we
go by. (“Bush Quietly Rolls Back Iraq Death Toll To
Zero”)
General Casey Jr.’s mistake is only truly con-
firmed when he states that only he and the Presi-
dent had access to the official death toll counter in
his office, making his previous estimation nothing
more than a computational error. As the story
explains, the first American combat death in the
region would only occur two weeks after Bush’s
visit to Iraq on July 18, 2006. In a clever twist, the
story reveals that the first dead soldier would be
memorialized in Arlington National Cemetery,
“next to the 2003 monument commemorating the
previous first American to die in Iraq.” The reve-
lation of this ironic detail—the presence of an
existing monument dedicated to the memory of
the first American casualty in Iraq—frames the
media as complicit in knowing the military/
government statement to be false, the story being
published in supposed good faith. Based on the
general’s testimony and the journalist’s unques-
tioning transcription of the administration’s posi-
tion, the story suggests that both government and
the military have conspired to reset the death toll
numbers, a collective feat that makes Bush’s pre-
vious call for Iraqi self-government at once more
palatable and more feasible. These ironic reconfig-
urations are readily intelligible to the reader
260 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 3  September 2012
because very little additional context is needed to
understand the critique. Other ironic details and
inflections, however, require deeper knowledge of
the issues at work and require further engagement
on the part of the reader.
In an interesting bit of editorial judgment, ref-
erences to Iraqi civilian deaths do not figure in
The Onion piece, mirroring the NYT article’s ear-
lier omission. The general’s inability to report the
precise number of deaths on either side of the con-
flict is unsurprising precisely because he can be
seen to be channeling an earlier sentiment made
by (the very real) General Tommy Franks in the
early days of the Iraq War. As Franks (in)
famously put it, “We don’t do body counts” (de
Vries). Furthermore, the day after The Onion
story’s publication, NYT reported that the Iraqi
death toll had risen to one hundred civilians per
day in the preceding month (Semple). While The
Onion story does not allude to the thousands of
Iraqi civilians and military personnel who have
died in the conflict, it implicitly critiques both the
government’s and the press’s collusion in not
placing broader emphasis on the human casualties
of the Iraq War. Together, government censorship
(in the form of the Pentagon’s outright ban on
photographing flag-draped coffins) and the
American press’s careful purging of images of car-
nage and death (deemed to be “in poor taste”)
(Goodman & Goodman 2006, 5) effectively soft-
ened the otherwise unpalatable representation of
the war.2 Due to these restrictions on the scope
and breadth of war reportage in Iraq, The Onion
headline is almost plausible due to the lack of cof-
fins and/or or images of dead soldiers in news
media. Irony then prompts a critical reappraisal of
the government’s handling of the Iraq War, invit-
ing readers to scrutinize the actions of both the
press and the Bush administration.
“Thousands More Dead in
Continuing Iraq Victory”
In a subsequent critique of the war, The Onion
would respond to an alarming rise in the Iraq
death toll by publishing “Thousands More Dead
in Continuing Iraq Victory.” The story, published
in December 2006, would appear on the heels of a
real groundbreaking report in The Lancet medical
journal, in which the study’s authors estimated
that 654,956 Iraqis (roughly 2.5% of the popula-
tion) had been killed since the inception of the
war. Importantly, “Thousands More Dead” devi-
ates from its predecessor in its straightforward
appeal to report more-or-less accurate statistics,
however, this time the actual death toll is used to
bolster America’s standing in the conflict and to
champion the United States’s ongoing “military
victory.” More precisely, The Onion frames the
Department of Defense’s estimated death toll of
2,937 US troops and over 100,000 Iraqi civilian
deaths as a means to solidify the United States’
continuing victory. Rather than merely dismissing
what might otherwise constitute a disturbing and
unpopular set of statistics, the Bush administra-
tion uses these somber findings to support its
claim that the United States is indeed winning the
battle.3 Thus, The Onion amplifies the existing
spectacle created by The Lancet report (a highly
publicized and contested set of findings) to draw
attention to the human costs of an escalating war.
Once again, irony figures prominently in this
story to reframe existing debates surrounding
rising death tolls in the Iraq War.
Far from promoting a constructive reconfigu-
ration of “foreign policy around human security
rather than national security” (Boseley) (one of
The Lancet report’s final recommendations),
America here marks its three and a half year
occupation of Iraq with a vindication of its
foreign policy measures. As (the fictionalized)
General Casey, Jr. affirms, even more troops will
be needed if the United States is to sustain its vic-
tory. Statements of this kind seem fairly routine
given the banality and redundancy of war rheto-
ric, but the story adds to the ironic import when
the reader learns that “Casey’s remarks came
nearly two weeks after some 200 Iraqi Shi’ites
died in a series of car bombs in Baghdad’s Sadr
City, the largest single victory-related death toll
since the United States won the Iraq War in
2003.” Indeed, “victory-related death[s]” of this
 Satirical Fake News  Ian Reilly
kind only further reinforce notions of United
States supremacy in a war it won in 2003, yet
another ironic reference to Bush’s highly propa-
gandized “Mission Accomplished” speech in May
of that year.4 In one final bit of ironic critique,
the story’s accompanying manipulated image
depicts Casey confidently standing at a Depart-
ment of Defense podium, behind him a host of
soldiers and flag-draped coffins. While there is
nothing particularly humorous about this form of
bricolage, the frank depiction of the general and
military personnel contradicts the Bush adminis-
tration’s outright ban on images of coffins. The
act of publishing the image (albeit in the name of
“victory”) is significant because it makes visible a
concrete, if repressed, reality of the war. Here
irony is also deployed to report unpopular statis-
tics (2,937 US military deaths, over 100,000 Iraqi
civilian deaths, 200 Iraqi Shi’ites), an act that chal-
lenges the reader to confront the harsh rise of
human casualties.
If a critique of Bush-era foreign policy still falls
flat, the reader might also register the story’s
muted parodic treatment of journalistic reportage.
Here the press relates the cold facts to the reader
(number of dead soldiers and civilians), solicits
statements from top-level figures (the president
and the chief commanding officer in Iraq), and
transcribes the story to reflect the government’s
position (the word “victory” appearing fourteen
times). The story relies exclusively on the Depart-
ment of Defense for information, statistics, and
context. Despite the single reference to a compet-
ing perspective (the question of whether US
troops should be withdrawn from Iraq), the story
quickly debunks the debate by citing both Bush
and military experts who maintain that “Iraqi
troops remain insufficiently trained and unpre-
pared to handle the daily perils of victory.” The
story effectively demonstrates that the press and
government are colluding to deliver an overarch-
ing narrative of “victory” to its various constitu-
ents. Through its critique, therefore, The Onion
contributes to a meaningful reevaluation of the
discourses surrounding foreign policy, especially
as they relate to broader notions of militaristic
conflict and imperial conquest. As the story’s
261
fictional Bush makes explicit, “We’re paying
dearly in the form of American lives, but, plainly
speaking, that’s just victory for you.” By re-con-
textualizing the largely hidden human costs of the
Iraq War through incisive critiques of mainstream
reportage and government rhetoric, these exam-
ples of satirical fake news interrogate the domi-
nant discourses generated by the incessant
drumming of the war machine.
“Bush Announces Iraq Exit
Strategy: ‘We’ll Go Through
Iran’”
The Middle East constitutes one of the most
pressing sites of geopolitical contestation. Given
the American military’s growing presence and
influence in the region, examining America’s
imperial aspirations, not to mention the manner in
which it pursues them, is of increasing impor-
tance. Discussions of the Iraq War are best under-
stood in relation to other geopolitical conflicts in
the Middle East. Bringing these issues to bear on
the present discussion, an Onion article entitled,
“Bush Announces Iraq Exit Strategy: ‘We’ll Go
Through Iran’” serves as an insightful critique of
Bush administration foreign policy. Published on
March 9, 2005, the story describes President
Bush’s long-awaited (albeit fictionalized) exit-
strategy, in which the latter unveils his govern-
ment’s plan to exit Iraq by way of Iran. At its
most basic level, this example crystallizes how the
interplay between the fake (mimetic) and the real
(current affairs) illuminates the flawed logic of the
Bush administration’s thinly veiled imperialist
agenda. But before ascertaining the full weight of
the story’s critique, some context is needed to elu-
cidate American foreign policy of the period, as
well as the country’s strained relationship with
Iran. In “Bush Announces Iraq Exit Strategy,”
The Onion assimilates mainstream media’s
month-long reportage of the United States–Iran
conflict to construct its critique.
In the month leading up to the story’s publica-
tion, anxieties surrounding a United States-led
262 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 3  September 2012
invasion of Iran were palpable as the press
reported a number of the country’s strained diplo-
matic efforts. First, President Bush, in his State of
the Union Address on February 2, 2005,
denounced Iran as being “the world’s primary
state sponsor of terror,” including the country as
part of his so-called “axis of evil” (“President
Delivers”). In a later effort to deflate growing
anxieties about a potential invasion of Iran, Bush
would offer this contradictory statement in a
speech he delivered to European allies at NATO
on February 22:
This notion that the United States is getting ready to
attack Iran is simply ridiculous. Having said that, all
options are on the table. (qtd. in Blumenthal)
In a turn of phrase that would delight Bush
Dyslexicon author Mark Crispin Miller, Bush
simultaneously dismisses and confirms his coun-
try’s preparations to attack Iran. Second, then
newly appointed Secretary of State, Condoleezza
Rice, intent to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons pro-
gram, “was unable to rule out an attack on Iran in
the future” (Crerar). Third, US General Lance
Smith confirmed that the military was in the pro-
cess of updating its war plan for Iran, a “normal
process,” he contended, that would serve to
“freshen routine plans for countries in the region”
(“US General Calls Update”). It is worth noting
here that news reports downplayed the potential
conflict during this period, focusing largely on the
Bush administration’s diplomatic efforts to
resolve its issues with Iran.5
In dramatizing Bush’s swift withdrawal of
American troops from Iraq and in amplifying the
mounting tensions between the United States and
Iran, this Onion piece encapsulates two defining
concerns of the period: the absence of any legiti-
mate exit strategy and the United States’s contin-
ued presence in the Middle East. Bush’s plan to
exit Iraq through Iran makes perfect sense, the
reader soon learns, because the United States has
deposed “Iran’s longtime enemy Saddam
Hussein,” a gesture that all but guarantees the
United States’s safe passage through Iran. If the
irony of Bush’s statement that the United States
“should be welcomed with open arms by the
Islamic-fundamentalist state” is only partly
understood at this point, it is fully revealed in an
accompanying image at the bottom of the page; in
this example of bricolage, the reader confronts
(the superimposed image of) a group of Muslim
women, most of whom are smiling openly as they
oversee the burning of an American flag. The cap-
tion reads: “Some of the Iranian citizens US
troops will meet as they pass through Iran.” This
highly charged visual representation of Iran’s
welcoming of American troops highlights the
contradictions between what is said and what is
depicted, a jarring juxtaposition that creates room
for critical reflection. Put another way, the
mimetic frame necessarily contradicts the real
frame, pointing to larger flaws in the govern-
ment’s newly articulated exit strategy. For any-
one following the United States–Iran conflict,
beginning with Bush’s State of the Union address,
a warm welcome in Iran would have been
unthinkable. In fact, by the end of February 2005,
The Seattle Times reported that Iran was already
publicly preparing for possible United States
attacks (Daragahi). The incompatibility of the
mimetic frame with real current events serves to
nudge the reader towards a more comprehensive
understanding of the geopolitical issues at play;
namely, that although the United States has yet to
concretize any real plans for invading neighbor-
ing countries in the Middle East, its imperialist
aspirations are made explicit.
Bush’s reasons for exiting Iraq via Iran, that is,
reasons of proximity (“It’s only a hop, skip, and a
jump to the east”), are expressed through a second
visual marker: a map depicting Iraq and Iran. The
seemingly gratuitous depiction of three oil rigs
that dot Iran’s “oil-rich borderlands” highlights a
more obvious justification for Bush’s “speedy
withdrawal of US troops from Iraq”—securing
the oil. Of course, with the withdrawal of US
troops through Iran comes General Casey’s pro-
posed $187-billion “withdrawal budget,” funds
needed to ensure the safe passage of the US mili-
tary. As The Onion reports, the budget will go
towards the purchase of “several hundred addi-
tional M1A1 Abrams battle tanks, 72 new C-130
cargo planes, and two brigades of artillery.” In
 Satirical Fake News  Ian Reilly
perhaps the most revealing passage of the story,
Bush’s exit strategy “includes a minor stopover
for refueling and provisional replenishment in
Syria,” for which only 50,000 additional troops
will be needed. Here fantasy is used to reveal the
hidden meaning behind the rhetoric of empire and
the discourse of military withdrawal. By propos-
ing an “unprecedented” budget, by requesting
50,000 additional troops, and by suggesting “a
minor stopover” in Syria, Bush’s benign exit strat-
egy is laid bare, as are his plans to invade Iran and
control the Middle East. In the end, the story’s
major fabrications (the United States’s departure
from Iraq and its move to Iran) point to the hol-
lowness of political discourse due in large part to
the absence of any legitimate timetable for with-
drawals from the region; more than this, however,
the story lends even greater weight to the notion
that American military operations in Iraq will
continue unabated, but its larger goal is to incite
greater debate about America’s presence in the
Middle East. To discuss political discourse in the
Middle East solely within the context of Bush-era
foreign policy would appear short-sighted, if
reductive. As such, the final two examples expand
the discussion of the Middle East to include more
recent political debates.
“Middle East Conflict
Intensifies as Blah Blah Blah,
Etc. Etc.”
To commemorate America’s fifth year in Iraq,
as well as its sixth year in Afghanistan, The Onion
once again engaged in foreign policy debates in
“Middle East Conflict Intensifies as Blah Blah
Blah, Etc. Etc.” This example nicely encapsulates
how satirical fake news subverts the codes and
conventions of traditional print news in the inter-
ests of amplifying basic flaws in contemporary
journalistic practices. In this piece, The Onion
challenges the notion that journalistic reportage
makes “culturally consonant messages readable
and culturally dissonant messages unsayable”
263
(Schudson 98–99), a project that journalism’s
dominant practices are meant to reinforce.
Instead, the story openly trivializes these ideals by
demonstrating how reportage cannot always
accurately or objectively convey reality, and how
codes and conventions can also obscure the com-
plexity of larger issues and problems. Through its
careful replication and subversion of the codes
and conventions of war reportage in the Middle
East, the story at once communicates the com-
plexity of intersecting and overlapping issues and
conveys the seeming futility of responding to
ongoing conflicts in the region.
At its most basic level, the story follows the
generic (who, what, when, where, how) narrative
formula: establishing the necessary context (war
in Iraq and Afghanistan), quoting elite public
officials (US Ambassador Crocker, United
Nations), citing continued problems and strug-
gles (widespread violence across the Middle East,
US military deaths), and transcribing an official
statement from the US government (President
Bush). The story is no different than most Onion
stories—it is completely contrived and has no
real credibility as an accurate representation of
the day’s events—but its subversion of traditional
standards proves useful in laying bare the
hollowness of journalistic discourse. Take, for
example, the following paragraph:
A certain number of U.S. troops were also killed some-
where in some tragic fashion, while a much greater
number were wounded. Meanwhile, impoverished or
oppressed supporters of whichever faction carried out
the attack or ambush probably celebrated, angering an
angry U.S. public that is already angry. Locals are call-
ing for an investigation into excessive force or outright
corruption by military or political officials on one of
the 15 sides of the various conflicts, although the
implicated party has categorically denied wrongdoing,
just like they always do, without fail, every time this
happens, which is daily, it seems.
In this passage, the satirist appears to be attempt-
ing to describe the harsh realities of war (some
soldiers having been killed, some wounded), only
to discern that on certain sides of the conflict(s)
supporters are celebrating while detractors are
(already) angry; some are calling for an investiga-
tion into any number of transgressions by parties
involved in the various conflicts; and the wrong-
264 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 3  September 2012
doers are always denying any wrongdoing
(“without fail”). In dramatizing journalism’s fail-
ure to objectively depict reality, The Onion story
illustrates not only how easily one’s subjectivity
enters the frame (“just like they always do”), but
it also reveals how readily the conventions of
newswriting reproduce meaningless stock phrases
and descriptors.
A review of three in-text examples shows the
first two representing ironic redescriptions of
stock news images. The first image depicts young
men confronting a military tank in a non-descript
area engulfed in flames. In a revealing caption,
“Yet another act of violence in response to some-
thing else terrible that occurred in, oh, let’s say
Basra,” The Onion editor openly displays his/her
subjective reading of the photo’s significance, cit-
ing that the violence could have been prompted
by just about anything and may or may not have
taken place in Basra. The Onion’s role in shaping
the meaning and context in which the image is
understood is made explicit, casting doubt as to
the journalist’s knowledge and expertise in
reporting on events of this magnitude. A second
image depicting the aftermath of a car bombing
offers the following caption: “Either a car bomb
killed people or a car hit a roadside bomb, killing
people.” One of two things may have happened,
the reader learns, but the end result is that a bomb
went off and people were killed; no location is
given and no motive is provided, likely due to the
ubiquity of this kind of news footage. Here the
degree to which the satirist clearly detaches him/
herself from the events is striking: the reportage
of the event seems inconsequential, if not an out-
right hindrance for real reporters to cover. Once
again, satirical fake news calls attention to the
journalist’s inability to convey sound informa-
tion. Thus, these images reveal the arbitrary
nature of how journalists contextualize a given
story’s visual cues. Far from providing any accu-
rate or meaningful information, these images (and
their accompanying captions) distance the reader
from any concrete understanding of the events; as
such, these ironic redescriptions help cast journal-
ists’ integrity in doubt. More specifically, The
Onion recontextualizes these images to uncover
contingency, to lay bare the social construction of
news discourse (Frazier 177), and to question the
veracity of news reporting. In this respect, this
piece constitutes what McNair calls “deconstruc-
tive, meta-discursive journalism” (64), journalism
that reflects on how the discourses of news and
information are shaped, controlled, perceived, and
managed.
Nowhere are these conventions more thor-
oughly observed and undermined than in the
story’s lead sentence:
With the Iraq war in its fifth year, the war in Afghani-
stan in its sixth … intelligence sources are warning that
a new wave of violence in the Middle East may soon
blah blah blah, etc. etc., you know the rest.
This final in-text example highlights how the con-
stant repetition of storylines, themes, and leitmo-
tifs (amplified ad nauseam in the mainstream
press) has ultimately reduced once meaningful
language to a series of “blah blah blah’s.” War
rhetoric and media talking points have become
exhausted. Consider The Onion’s epigrammatic
use of this rhetoric:
Also, Ahmadinejad, Iran’s nuclear program, bin Laden
at large, Moqtada al-Sadr, Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia,
Fallujah, renegade mullahs, embedded and/or
beheaded journalists, oil revenues, stockpiles of former
Soviet armaments, freedom, racism, Halliburton,
women’s role in Islamic society, the Quran, withdraw-
ing troops, economic disparities, Sikhs, Pakistanis, oil,
rebuilding, stories of hope, the Saudi royal family, the
Holy Land, insurgents, and the tragedy of Sept. 11th.
In satisfying all of the core generic questions that
inform the traditional journalist’s inverted pyra-
mid writing style, the story provides a detailed
list of overarching political questions and con-
cerns, without attempting to qualify their place in
the story. Within the logic of the story, the mere
act of including these figures, terms, and tropes
represents the journalist’s muted effort to satisfy
the conventional criteria of a given news story
(the who, what, when, where, and how). What
is more, this practice of cataloguing complex
issues (free of context or analysis) undercuts any
efforts to enlighten the reader in understanding
key issues at play in the Middle East. The subver-
sion of codes and conventions here exposes the
subjective underpinnings of journalistic/editorial
 Satirical Fake News  Ian Reilly
practices and interrogates the meaning and value
of everyday reportage on issues of great civic and
political importance.
Withdrawing from Iraq:
A Real “Mess O’Potamia”
On June 30, 2009, nationwide festivities in Iraq
were marked by parades, fireworks, and a national
holiday, as Iraqis celebrated an increased with-
drawal6 of US troops initiated by President
Obama (A. Rubin). As noted, however, America’s
plans to withdraw from Iraq have proven difficult
to articulate in both theory and practice. Citing a
number of key concerns, anxieties remain regard-
ing the consequences of the Obama administra-
tion’s proposed withdrawal from Iraq. In effect,
the United States’s pending withdrawal has raised
some important questions in mainstream media
regarding: (i) Iraq’s ability to oversee a fully-func-
tioning government, (ii) its capacities to build an
economic infrastructure that will support its citi-
zens, and (iii) its effectiveness in staving off a
potential civil war (Tanneeru). On the heels of
Obama’s announcement that the United States
will leave Iraq in 2010, the president faced a wall
of resistance in the form of a network of senior
military officials, including Commander General
Petraeus and Defense Secretary Gates. Alongside
other critics of Obama’s core foreign policy initia-
tive, these figures are actively seeking to reverse
the president’s decision (“Generals Seek”). The
following example from TDS highlights the use of
humor, juxtaposition, and remediation in the
articulation of critique.
A few weeks shy of the six-year anniversary of
the Iraq War, TDS would return to a popular seg-
ment, “Mess O’Potamia” (pun intended), a recur-
ring news item on the program that explores
ongoing coverage of the Iraq War (“The Iraq War
Is Over”). On March 3, 2009, Stewart addressed a
recent speech by President Obama in which he
cited August 31, 2010 as America’s official with-
drawal date from Iraq. Greeting the news with
gleeful affirmation and praise, Stewart sings John
265
Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” while
balloons and confetti cascade the screen. Pro-
claiming the end of the war, a triumphant Stewart
celebrates by playfully dismissing the program’s
“Mess O’Potamia” graphics, a visual hallmark
that had become something of a TDS mainstay.
But such celebrations are ultimately short-lived
when Obama momentarily reappears on screen to
deliver the accompanying remarks of his speech.
As Obama notes, the United States’s combat mis-
sion in Iraq will effectively end in 2010, but a
“transitional force” of 35,000–50,000 US troops
will be needed to guarantee a safe transition for
the Iraqi people. A confounded Stewart responds
to the speech by reinterpreting the thrust of
Obama’s logic, stating that “Everybody is coming
home except several dozen thousands of soldiers.”
Here the humor quickly devolves into horror.
This seemingly contradictory set of remarks—
that the United States’s withdrawal from Iraq will
precipitate the redeployment of a large number of
soldiers—is further scrutinized when Obama
states that United States involvement in Iraq will
shift from combat to “training, equipping, and
advising.” To better contextualize the new shift
Obama proposes, Stewart repurposes a 2007
George W. Bush address in which the former
president speaks of a broader transition in Iraq; in
the clip, Bush highlights how troops will take on
“a more limited set of tasks,” that of “training,
equipping, and supporting” Iraqi forces. Through
remediation, Stewart effectively confirms that
very little separates Obama’s current position on
the military withdrawal from Iraq from Bush’s
previous proposal, a feat accomplished through
the juxtaposition of both figure’s rhetoric in
mainstream media.
To fully register the near exact replication of
their words, Stewart has a computer simulation
analyze the rhetoric deployed in both men’s
speeches, the juxtaposition creating a jarring sense
of unease in the host’s assessment of the day’s
events. If President Obama is legitimately calling
for a fixed withdrawal from Iraq in 2010, Stewart
muses, perhaps the language being deployed is
undermining the integrity of his statements.
Concerns regarding the Obama administration’s
266 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 3  September 2012
misleading, if dubious, use of language surfaces in
the segment’s following frame. As Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates confirms, the withdrawal
will bring about a significant reconfiguration in
the army’s duties and, more tellingly, in the
administration’s use of language: what were once
referred to as “combat brigades” will in the future
be called “advisory and assistance brigades.”
Thus, by interrogating these different pieces of
news footage (remediation), TDS not only reveals
the similarity between both administrations’ posi-
tions toward withdrawal from Iraq (“training,
equipping, and advising”), the program also high-
lights the disparity between the enunciation of
the speech (“Our combat mission in Iraq will
end”) and its actual meaning (“Our mission will
change from combat to supporting the Iraqi gov-
ernment and its security forces”). On the heels of
the Iraq War’s sixth year, this “Mess O’Potamia”
segment provides a clear indication that with-
drawal from Iraq is still very much a matter of
future speculation.
Although the following discussion of the 2008
American presidential election may differ mark-
edly in both theme and scope from the previous
examples, it illustrates some key points of interac-
tion between them by extending the analysis.
Because election coverage of presidential politics
is a well-documented phenomenon in America,
observing patterns in news media’s election
reportage has become a common practice for cul-
tural critics and political scientists alike. At the
risk of oversimplifying these patterns, Jones
describes three overarching tendencies in election
reporting:
(1) elections are treated as a sports contest between
two combatants (typically horse racing or, in this
instance, boxing); (2) the press focuses on the cam-
paign’s strategies more than the issues themselves; and
(3) the press often parrots the message that political
campaigns want them to report, circulating the rheto-
ric and slogans without intensive scrutiny or criticism.
(174)
Given the narrow scope of election reportage out-
lined by Jones, parodic news discourse plays a sig-
nificant role in diversifying, demystifying, and
deconstructing what passes for informed cover-
age. It is not my goal to prove or disprove the
contentious Pew study’s findings that programs
like TDS and TCR attracted the most well
informed television audiences in the run-up to the
2008 election (“Key News Audiences”); rather,
my larger objective is to demonstrate how satirical
fake news reframed conventional reportage of the
election across several platforms.
“Why Are You Treating Me
Like a Real Person?”: Stephen
Colbert Runs for President
On October 16, 2007, Comedy Central’s
Stephen Colbert announced his (fake) candidacy
for president on TCR, highlighting that he would
run in the South Carolina primaries—as a Repub-
lican and a Democrat. Colbert’s presidential bid
immediately generated a maelstrom of critical
commentary across the web, from bloggers to
Colbert Nation fans to the mainstream press.
Colbert’s candidacy would earn him a guest col-
umn for Maureen Dowd in the NYT, in which
the satirist used the Op-Ed forum to critique the
president (“George Bush has proved definitively
that to be president, you don’t need to care about
science, literature or peace”) and to address why
“a lot of Americans feel confused about the cur-
rent crop of presidential candidates” (Colbert).7
Colbert’s presidential bid drew so much media
attention that he would also land an appearance
on NBC’s Meet the Press, what one reporter
called “a required venue for any serious presiden-
tial contender” (“Colbert Discusses”). Having
generated a sizeable media spectacle, Colbert
would quickly distance himself from the rest of
the so-called legitimate candidates, framing his
political agenda in these terms: “I don’t want to
be president,” Colbert told Meet the Press host
Tim Russert, “I want to run for president. There’s
a difference” (“Colbert: Bid”). Colbert’s “infiltra-
tion of the ‘real’ world of politics” (Osborne-
Thompson 79) reveals the satirist as less interested
in winning the race than in unraveling the elitist,
inside-the-beltway-culture of presidential politics.
To be sure, Colbert’s parody of the presidential
 Satirical Fake News  Ian Reilly
candidate is readily intelligible in his NYT and
Meet the Press appearances,8 but this analysis lim-
its his use of spectacle as a means to demystify
electoral politics and to critique traditional arms
of American news media.
Within the realm of (fake) presidential cam-
paigning, process trumps product, shifting the
prominent horse race-style coverage in favor of
illuminating some of the hidden mechanisms at
work in campaign politics. Two such issues (both
legal and economic) would surface based solely
on Colbert’s candidacy. The first controversy
generated by Colbert came in the guise of his
intention to use his television program as a vehicle
for his campaign, an act that would have placed
TCR’s parent company Viacom in danger of
breaking a Federal Election Commission (FEC)
law that “prohibits corporations from making
‘any contribution or expenditure in connection
with a federal election’” (Lapidos). Due to these
restrictions, two problems emerged for the cam-
paign: (i) any time Colbert promoted his candi-
dacy on the show, he was indirectly accepting a
contribution from Viacom (the FEC does not
exempt satirical programs from receiving unquali-
fied airtime); and (ii) because the Federal Com-
munication Commission (FCC) stipulates that all
radio and television stations must treat political
candidates equally in terms of the distribution and
allocation of airtime, Colbert (and by extension,
Viacom) flirted dangerously with violating exist-
ing election laws. In this regard, Colbert’s antics
are significant because he provided opportunities
for the electorate to consider otherwise hidden
legal issues that would not have figured in the
election’s (already) limited frame.
The second issue Colbert would raise during
his short-lived election run relates to the econom-
ics of political campaigning. On the subject of
political financing, Dowd’s column would once
again serve a useful forum for Colbert. In it, he
highlights the economic disparities of running for
the primaries in South Carolina, stating that he
would need a cool “15 million. Cash.” Of course,
his remark is meant to highlight how Newt
Gingrich goaded his supporters in “saying that if
his supporters raised $30 million, he would run
267
for president.” When Colbert ended his bid for
the White House, he highlighted some of the hid-
den administrative costs of filing for the election
primaries: filing with the Republican party, for
example, would have cost an estimated $37,500
(“Stephen Colbert Drops”); as a result, Colbert
declined to file with the GOP. Colbert’s original
decision to file with both political parties, how-
ever, makes explicit the exclusionary character of
electoral campaigning. Running for president,
Colbert suggests, is not open to all. Upon being
asked if he would leave his show to tackle the
campaign trail directly, Colbert offered one jour-
nalist the following statement: “[Y]ou know what
it pays to be a presidential candidate? Not well.’”
(Kurtz). In the end, Colbert’s run suggests that
the promise of launching a bid for the White
House is limited to the very few elites who have
both the resources and financial backing to tackle
such an endeavor. It is in this capacity that the
American constitutional system has created a
fervently contradictory electoral system—one
that embraces equality as the pinnacle of all civic
endeavors and outcomes, and one that seems com-
placent in accepting wide inequalities in economic
and political resources (Bartels et al. 136). As
Bartels et al. remind us, “In the realm of public
life, political rights are guaranteed to all citizens
but political participation continues to be strati-
fied” (136). Perhaps the greatest lesson Colbert
teaches us in this regard is, in the words of
Osborne-Thompson, “[that the] walls that for-
merly separated political insiders and outsiders,
cable and network, pundits and parodists is [sic]
now quite permeable” (80).
The politics of the fake presidential candidate,
however, cannot be easily reduced to commentary
on legal and/or economic barriers in electoral
politics. Rather, the fake candidate’s raison d’être
is linked to his/her “impulse to talk back to false
images of televisual politics” and is tied to his/her
civic responsibility of broadening the parameters
of public discourse by providing a “fundamen-
tally different view of the world than the one
offered by the pool of available candidates at their
respective moments” (Osborne-Thompson
80–81). Importantly, Colbert’s parodic gaze is not
268 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 3  September 2012
only directed at the candidates vying for the
presidency or at the structures that define the
electoral process; his gaze is also reserved for a
mainstream news media system that fails to
engage candidates in any substantial way. As Col-
bert’s appearances in the mainstream press attest
(NYT, Meet the Press), the satirist’s most impor-
tant contribution materializes in his critique of
the serious (read: credentialed) strands of journal-
ism for allowing him to appear in their otherwise
hallowed forums. According to Colbert’s logic, if
the NYT and Meet the Press were legitimate gate-
keepers in the dissemination of newsworthy
information and political knowledge, they would
dismiss his presidential bid (and his bid for main-
stream attention) as nothing more than a diver-
sionary news grab. Instead, such venues are
complicit in allowing Colbert to openly mock and
ridicule them for not maintaining their supposed
journalistic integrity. Thus Colbert’s parodic
appearances provide a powerful mode for ques-
tioning the legitimacy and authority of dominant
actors in news media.
“Things Are Really Going to
Be Different Now”: 2008
McCain = 2000 Bush
In “John McCain’s Big Acceptance Speech,”
TDS examines the rhetoric used in McCain’s 2008
acceptance speech at the Republican National
Convention (RNC) to evaluate any differences
between his political agenda and President George
W. Bush’s previous campaign platform; remedia-
tion figures in the deconstruction of McCain’s
rhetoric. Through the exposition of “video incon-
gruities” (Stewart’s term) the segment not only
takes aim at Senator McCain, but it also ridicules
the Republican Party via the host of speakers that
precede him. Stewart’s repurposing of the footage
from the RNC seems effortless in many respects
because he spends the majority of his time review-
ing the clips, only to undercut the full import of
each respective speech. The segment draws on
remediation, irony, and humor to highlight the
unintelligibility and insincerity of the rhetoric
deployed by the GOP’s most prominent figures.
Stewart’s analysis of the event begins with a
general discussion of the venue—the viewer
moves from a medium shot of the crowd, to the
podium, and to “a stage that appeared to be giving
America the middle finger.” The stage’s uncanny
resemblance to the image of a pointed finger
framed against the spectacular backdrop of the
American flag sets the stage for Stewart’s larger
critique of the Republican Party. In what follows,
Stewart points to the incongruities and/or dispari-
ties between audio-visual cues and speech to
isolate some of the evening’s overriding themes.
Stewart first turns to a discussion of the GOP’s
policy of not “allow[ing] soldiers, caskets, or
funerals to be photographed,” a policy that is bril-
liantly undercut in Senator Lindsey Graham’s
speech when he delivers the following sentiment
accompanied by a giant backdrop of military
graves: “Let there be no doubt about it. We are on
the road to victory.” Stewart makes quick work
of Graham for his failure to perceive this apparent
contradiction and for his equating military deaths
with victory (recall The Onion’s “Thousands
More Dead in Continuing Iraq Victory”). Here
Stewart merely inserts a joke to deflate the
unseemly rhetoric: “Wait, why isn’t anybody
clapping? There’s a giant picture of graves behind
me, isn’t there?” Stewart then moves on to “the
dulcet tones” of former Senator Fred Thompson’s
introduction speech to refocus the evening’s
agenda. Stewart cues footage of a darkened con-
vention center, Thompson’s voice projecting this
remark: “When you’ve lived in a box, your life is
about keeping others from having to endure that
box.” While the footage appears without context,
Stewart inserts yet another joke, this time to
downplay the theatricality of the scene: “Ladies
and gentlemen,” Stewart quips, “David Blaine.”
Here the inset graphic shows illusionist David
Blaine performing his Above the Below, a stunt in
which he subsisted for forty-four days in a sus-
pended Plexiglas case surviving on water alone. If
Thompson’s aim is to bolster McCain’s standing
as a decorated war hero (a strategy the GOP
 Satirical Fake News  Ian Reilly
returned to consistently during the campaign),
Stewart calls attention to the needless artifice used
to tell that story. As Stewart’s prodding analysis
of the speech makes clear, Thompson could have
very well been introducing David Blaine as the
Republican nominee.
Of course the segment’s final critique would
materialize in the form of McCain’s acceptance
speech, in what Stewart calls the evening’s “stir-
ring anticlimax.” Stewart first points to McCain’s
entrance on the stage (McCain looking like some-
one “walking out onto the set of the Arsenio Hall
Show”), further amplifying the spectacular ele-
ments of the event. In his speech, McCain empha-
sizes the importance of fiscal responsibility and
accountability, a point he makes in this short
extract:
The first big-spending pork-barrel earmark bill that
comes across my desk, I will veto it. I will make them
famous, and you will know their names. You will
know their names. (“John McCain’s Big Acceptance
Speech”)
To highlight the absurdity of the statement, Stew-
art immediately points to a certain recently-
appointed “wasteful jackass mayor of an Alaskan
town of only six thousand people who requested
twenty-seven million dollars in government ear-
marks.” With the inset graphic displaying an
image of running-mate Sarah Palin, Stewart, chan-
neling the energy and bombast of McCain’s deliv-
ery, makes one notable modification: “I will make
her famous!”9 The speech’s central theme—the
need “to change the way [politicians] do business
in Washington”—provides all the raw material
Stewart would need to deliver his final assessment
of McCain’s agenda. Here Stewart playfully
muses that McCain’s emphasis on change is remi-
niscent of another campaign platform he’d
encountered before. Stewart first reviews a clip of
Obama addressing the need “for change to come
to Washington,” only to dismiss his words in
favor of a George W. Bush address from August
3, 2000: “I want to change the tone of Washington.”
What follows is a systematic juxtaposition of
McCain’s acceptance speech rhetoric with that of
Bush (circa 2000). The result is an uncanny resem-
269
blance between both figures’ political platforms,
enacted through similarly worded sets of talking
points. Both figures speak of “a culture of life,”
education reform, reduced taxes, bipartisanship,
and cultivating a spirit of selflessness and sharing.
The back-and-forth remediation of both candi-
dates’ talking points (a strategy that reinforces the
similarities between their campaigns) culminates
in the segment’s most brilliant stroke: TDS moves
to a split screen of 2000 Bush and 2008 McCain,
both expressing their gratitude to each other. This
final juxtaposition demonstrates just how little
change is coming to Washington precisely because
McCain’s agenda so closely resembles that of his
Republican predecessor.
“Get Ready for a Summer of
Political Courtship”: Target
Women’s “Suffrage”
On the heels of Hillary Clinton’s decision to
end her bid for the presidency, Current TV’s
Target Women, hosted by Sarah Haskins, would
air a special report on how frontrunners Barack
Obama and John McCain were attempting to win
the “female vote.” In this clever deconstruction of
media analysis and campaign politics, Haskins
uses remediation to highlight the excessive
pandering that ensued following Clinton’s with-
drawal from the election race. By juxtaposing a
wide range of campaign materials and footage, the
“Suffrage” segment reveals the length to which
both political campaigns would go to win, as
Haskins put it, “[their] slice of the Clinton con-
stituency.” With Haskins as the guide, one learns
that Obama and McCain first take to basic cable
to address the women’s vote directly; in two con-
secutive frames, the viewer sees both figures
endorsing Army Wives (a Lifetime television
drama), leaving the host unable to decide which
candidate deserves her vote. If liking Army Wives
doesn’t demonstrate enough cultural capital, Has-
kins moves to a brief discussion of the candidates’
exposure on what she calls “our TV,” mapping
their appearances on Ellen, Tyra, and The View.
270 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 3  September 2012
The quick succession of remediated content leads
Haskins to a preliminary assessment of their
efforts: “The strategy seems to be, just stick your-
self in the middle of enough women and it’s like
you practically are one.” And to make her point
more succinctly, Haskins accompanies her com-
ments with footage of both figures surrounded by
women (McCain dancing with a female supporter
and Obama waving from an enthusiastic crowd).
A second dimension of her critique is rooted
in what constituted widespread reportage of
women voters’ anger following Clinton’s depar-
ture. The segment begins with Haskins posing
the following rhetorical question: “Why am I so
angry?” To answer this question, Haskins repur-
poses five short clips from three networks
(CNN, FOX, NBC), all of which speak to the
anger of “women supporters.” To deflate what
she dismisses as trivial (if misleading) media rhet-
oric, she reveals the true source of her anger, that
is, “watching [media commentators] talk about
how angry I am.” Of course, it is precisely this
theme of female anger that would spark the
Obama and McCain campaigns to shift its rela-
tionship to Clinton. Through another sequence
of campaign materials, Haskins demonstrates yet
again the similarities between the two campaigns.
From juxtaposed speeches by McCain and
Obama, the viewer not only learns that both
candidates are all too eager to say “nice things”
about Clinton, but s/he also learns that they say
effectively “the same nice things.” In what fol-
lows, footage alternates back and forth between
both men, each candidate speaking to Clinton’s
strength, courage, and inspiration, highlighting,
in the process, just how closely their speeches
were in both nature and scope. Responding to
the hollowness of their rhetoric, Haskins likens
their speeches to a Hallmark card expressing the
following sentiment: “On the occasion of losing
the presidency.”
In yet another attempt to shore up the Clin-
ton vote, Obama and McCain would post
images of Clinton on their respective websites
to demonstrate their affiliation with their for-
mer opponent: the Obama site features Clinton
against a “light blue heaven” background
(“Thank You Senator Clinton”) while the
McCain campaign would post an image of the
Republican senator “fishing or something” with
Clinton. More than merely pandering to “the
Clinton constituency,” however, both cam-
paigns made appeals to the female electorate
through Web sites devoted exclusively to
women. As Haskins observes, the McCain site
“basically just asks you for money”—a strategy
that incites her to donate “seventy-five cents of
my dollar” to the campaign; the Obama site,
on the other hand, includes a twenty-minute
video that uses “a lot of sensitive, caring words
to describe [Obama].” The segment’s final
scene is punctuated with ironic speculation as
to how this “season of political courtship” will
end: “Will Barack get season tickets to the
WNBA [Women’s National Basketball Associa-
tion]? Will John McCain guest star on Grey’s
Anatomy?” Given the extent to which both
candidates are willing to go to win over the
female electorate, Haskins suggests, there is no
limit to their future actions. In an acute display
of political savvy, Haskins actually predicts a
woman as vice presidential candidate. The arri-
val of Sarah Palin later that August confirms
Haskins’ final analysis cutting through the
media rhetoric and political posturing to reveal
a larger truth about the political motivations
behind such initiatives: “They just want us for
our votes.”10 In “Suffrage,” Haskins demon-
strates what a powerful tool remediation can
be in the demystification of both media cover-
age and political strategy.
Palin/Couric vs. Fey/Poehler
McCain’s decision to have Palin join the presi-
dential ticket was the subject of much discussion
in American public discourse, a political move
that created a widespread media spectacle. Upon
entering the McCain campaign fold, Palin would
emerge as a much-celebrated, much-maligned
public figure. Palin’s questionable intellectual
acumen quickly became the subject of a wide
 Satirical Fake News  Ian Reilly
array of news stories, blog entries, and YouTube
videos. One particularly snarky strand of this crit-
icism would materialize in this rhetorical flourish
by Guardian commentator Oliver Burkeman: Is
Sarah Palin operating from a plane of intelligence
so elevated it seems like stupidity? (Burkeman).
Nowhere was this spirit of critique more consis-
tently leveled against Palin than in Tina Fey’s
parodic impersonations of the governor on Satur-
day Night Live. The skits captured not only wide-
spread attention from multiple media outlets, they
also attracted some fifty-six million viral video
views in 2008 alone (Cutler). Rather than measure
the effects these videos had on the political
campaign (as one study had already attempted
[Esralew 2009]), the following illustrates how the
deployment of pastiche and parody incites a criti-
cal reevaluation of the political candidate and the
broader culture of media-style politics.
At first blush, Tina Fey’s pitch-perfect imper-
sonations of Governor Palin strike the general
viewer as constituting little more than clever
parodies of an easy target. Instead of framing the
video as parody, however, one should consider
why it might also be profitable to situate the text
as pastiche. If pastiche is “a kind of imitation that
you are meant to know is an imitation” (Dyer 1),
Fey’s work readily falls under this designation.
From the up-do hair to the librarian-style glasses
through the unmistakable Alaskan dialect, Fey’s
Palin imitation is instantly decipherable. In what
remains the most discussed parody of the period
—SNL’s meticulous reworking of Sarah Palin’s
exclusive interview with CBS anchor Katie
Couric—Fey’s performance conforms best to our
understanding of pastiche. This knowing imita-
tion in particular was discussed enthusiastically
in the mainstream press, Fey’s resemblance to the
governor described by journalists as “uncanny”
while prompting others to call her Palin’s
“doppelgänger” (Esralew 8). Indeed what most
solidifies the segment’s footing as pastiche is
SNL’s substantial transposition (if not wholesale
transcription) of the original interview. Fey’s
response to Couric’s (Amy Poehler’s) question
regarding a proposed seven billion dollar bailout
for Wall Street goes as follows:
271
Like every American I’m speaking with, we’re ill
about this. We’re saying, ‘Hey, why bail out Fanny
and Freddie and not me?’ But ultimately what the bail-
out does is, help those that are concerned about the
healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our
economy to help…uh…it’s gotta be all about job crea-
tion, too. Also, too, shoring up our economy and
putting Fannie and Freddy back on the right track and
so healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reigning
in spending…’cause Barack Obama, y’know…has got
to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for
Americans, also, having a dollar value meal at restau-
rants. That’s gonna help. But one in five jobs being cre-
ated today under the umbrella of job creation. That,
you know…Also… (“Tina Fey as Sarah Palin”)
What makes this a fascinating speech, and what
makes the speech a compelling example of pas-
tiche is that a majority of the dialogue is pulled
directly from the Couric/Palin interview—in
some instances, word-for-word. In an illuminat-
ing interview with late-night talk show host
David Letterman, Tina Fey speaks to the show’s
proclivity to integrate Palin’s words with very
little editorial oversight. More specifically, Fey
refers directly to the above passage as a piece of
dialogue that prompted the least amount of edi-
torial manipulation. What viewers of both vid-
eos witness, Fey playfully remarks, is how
Palin/Fey “kinda got lost in a corn maze.” To
highlight just how similar the two performances
are, one YouTube video has edited both scenes
back-to-back (“SNL Palin Couric Video”).
What viewers of the SNL skit observed was a
slightly manipulated and humorous version of
the original interview, one that boasted faithful
depictions of Palin’s hand gestures, mannerisms,
and rhetorical flourishes. Put another way, Fey’s
pastiche represents a condensed reproduction of
the original text, albeit punctuated with comic
instincts and timing. Whereas Jameson’s famous
discussion of pastiche as “blank parody” may
still resonate in certain contexts, here pastiche’s
“politics of closeness” (Dyer 167) provide a nec-
essary frame for critiquing Governor Palin’s lack
of intellectual rigor and critical thinking skills. If
parody assumes a polemical function in its cut-
ting imitative form, one might point to the SNL
parodies as polemics that work “towards the
imitated text [Palin] or towards the ‘world’
[electoral politics] (Dentith 17). Through this
272 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 3  September 2012
second frame, Fey’s impersonations can be
regarded as an invitation “to examine, evaluate,
and re-situate the hypotextual (original) mate-
rial” (16). Through pastiche, viewers of the SNL
viral videos (some fifty-six million) were affor-
ded the opportunity to critically evaluate,
compare, and re-situate the political platform of
an important figure in the 2008 election. While
it would be impossible to determine what effect
Fey’s work had on the election, one does learn
that pastiche and parody produced important
moments for the critical evaluation of political
spectacle.
Diebold’s Stolen Election of
2008
Responding to emerging anxieties regarding
the overall integrity and trustworthiness of elec-
tronic voting machines, in February 2008 The
Onion dramatized the dystopian fantasy of mass
election fraud in the video segment, “Diebold
Accidentally Leaks Results of 2008 Election
Early.” One of many parodic news reports to
air during the Onion News Network’s (ONN)
continuous coverage of the 2008 election, the
segment tackled the question of election fraud
to shed light on some potential problems a shift
toward digital voting might precipitate. The
story depicts the Diebold Corporation (a major
player in the development, delivery, and imple-
mentation of electronic voting machines in the
United States), accidentally releasing the results
of the 2008 presidential election—ten months
before election day. As the ONN news anchor
remarks, Diebold’s mistake “marks the first
time the nation’s leader has been revealed pre-
maturely.” Attempting to downplay the severity
of the situation, Diebold PR spokesman Ernie
Kenilworth suggests that despite his company’s
recklessness in spoiling the election, the citi-
zenry would still have the opportunity to vote
in the November ballet. When asked why
America needs voting machines, Kenilworth
suggests that in future elections Diebold would
“properly safeguard the illusion of democracy
for all Americans.” Although senator John
McCain’s fictitious victory11 would hold (the
front-running Republican winning 48% of the
popular vote), Kenilworth also added that Die-
bold would still uphold its duties of pretending
to count votes on election night. Lastly, rather
than formally apologizing to the American pub-
lic for destroying the integrity of one of democ-
racy’s most sacred rituals, Kenilworth reserved
his final apology for the “shadowy puppet-mas-
ters” of the electoral process, signaling these
backstage actors as the real motors of American
democracy. In its elaborate use of fantasy, the
report brings into sharper relief the potential
threat electronic voting poses to fundamental
democratic processes; the story’s use of artifice,
moreover, reveals the layers of PR rhetoric and
journalistic posturing that would emerge
following such a spectacular debacle. Far from
merely resorting to parody in the articulation of
critique, however, this example draws heavily
on the interaction between the real and the
mimetic frame, on pastiche, and on the subver-
sion of codes and conventions.
In terms of providing some preliminary context
for the story, The Onion’s critique of electronic
voting was not without measure, as concerns over
the implementation and use of the machines had
grown steadily since the 2004 election.12 In 2004,
for example, California lawmakers banned four
counties from using electronic voting machines
and ordered ten other counties to improve secu-
rity and reliability features before an upcoming
November election. Secretary of State Kevin
Shelley announced the ban, citing Diebold’s
“reprehensible” and illegal conduct as the key
rationale behind the legal ruling (Lucas). Two
years later, a 2006 Princeton study of the Diebold
AccuVote-TS voting machine concluded that the
devices were vulnerable to external tampering,
making election fraud virtually undetectable
through the implementation of voting machine
viruses (Feldman et al. 2). Similarly, in 2008, elec-
tronic touch-screen voting machines were just as
easily manipulated and were susceptible to unde-
tectable voter fraud (Nelson). Hence, the story’s
 Satirical Fake News  Ian Reilly
broader function is twofold: first, to critique
news media’s sensationalist entertainment-style
reportage, what Onion writers might readily call
the dominant register of election coverage, and
second, to address the future impact electronic
voting machines may have on the democratic
process.
The segment begins with all the hallmarks of a
contemporary television news broadcast: dramatic
music, the ONN network logo (itself a pastiche
of the CNN logo), and the ever-present American
flag; what is more, the story’s opening credits are
punctuated by the inclusion of spectacular graph-
ics (explosions, flames, and fighter jets soaring
above an engulfed White House). These features,
however outlandish they may appear, do not
assume as much hyperbolic resonance next to
their more traditional journalistic counterparts.
Here pastiche’s “ironic transcontextualization”
(Hutcheon) of television news provides much
needed critical distance from the original. In its
recurring War For The White House segment,
ONN readily channels all the bombast and pro-
duction values of other well-known televisual
precursors; namely, Fox News’ War on Terror
coverage and CNN’s Attack on America report-
age. The seamlessness of the production values
(graphics, tickers) and the calculated seriousness
of the news anchors and interviewees prepare the
way for critical reflection.
In reproducing these highly stylized, grossly
mediated news reports, War For The White House
uses pastiche (in a near replication of the original)
to call attention to news media’s overblown
emphasis on entertainment values.13 The evalua-
tive distance generated by the pastiche creates
moments for the audience to discern the major
networks’ reliance on entertainment-style news
reportage at the expense of delivering valuable
election analysis and commentary. As The
Onion’s Diebold story emphasizes, McCain’s win
is treated as nothing more than “a big election
spoiler;” any attempts to question or interrogate
major breaches in the democratic process are eas-
ily glossed over in the interests of preserving the
story’s spectacular tone. In the end, ONN elec-
tion coverage deploys pastiche in productive
273
ways, in that it subtly amplifies and makes ridicu-
lous the ways in which news organizations shape,
produce, and package content. In dramatizing a
compelling scenario of electronic voter fraud, The
Onion proved successful in bringing the question
of electoral fraud to the foreground of American
public discourse.
Conclusion
This essay critically engages the ways in which
satirical fake news responds to the everyday dis-
cursive realities of newsgathering practices. The
form’s reflexive, metadiscursive approach to the
construction of politically motivated journalism
shows that satirical fake news significantly
reframed public discourse surrounding two domi-
nant issues: the Iraq War and the 2008 American
presidential election. Four fluid conceptual frames
(codes and conventions, satirical elements, specta-
cle, and modes of appropriation) illustrate how
satirical fake news levels its critique against vari-
ous actors and institutions. More than simply sati-
rizing current affairs, the examples described
above demonstrate how corporately owned, pro-
fessionally produced variants of the form re-present
issues of great civic importance. These overlap-
ping texts ultimately frame civic issues within a
larger political context usually ill afforded in
today’s condensed and often information-poor
24-hour news cycle.
Notes
1. It is perhaps unsurprising that my analysis focuses heavily on
these examples of satirical fake news because they represent the most
active and prolific producers of the form. Because their work is dis-
seminated on a weekly basis, they are provided the opportunity to
critically comment on the events and issues covered in mainstream
media. Finally, because the Iraq War/ US foreign policy and the 2008
American presidential election generated a tidal wave of media cov-
erage, news parody would follow suit, as its parasitic character
engages current events as framed by mainstream media.
2. Questions surrounding the appropriateness of showing images
of human carnage, death and destruction would come to the fore
274 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 3  September 2012
following the release of Michael Moore’s documentary-polemic,
Fahrenheit 9/11 and in Al-Jazeera’s unflinching coverage of the Iraq
War. Responding to the practice of including such images in its
broadcasts, ABC News president David Westin announced in 2003,
“I don’t think there’s any value in it” (“Image Conscious”).
3. When asked what victory in the “war on terrorism” would
mean for America, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
had this to say: “Now, what is victory? I say that victory is per-
suading the American people and the rest of the world that this
is not a quick matter that’s going to be over in a month or a
year or even five years. It is something that we need to do so
that we can continue to live in a world with powerful weapons
and with people who are willing to use those powerful weapons.
And we can do that as a country. And that would be victory, in
my view” (qtd. in Miller xlii). Rumsfeld makes these remarks on
September 12, 2001.
4. In his speech, Bush confidently declared the end of all major
combat operations in Iraq. For a short description of the spectacular,
propagandistic elements of the speech, see Duncombe 28–29.
5. For those less inclined to take the news media’s optimistic
reportage at face value, concerned observers of the Bush administra-
tion’s powerful rhetoric (that Iran was seen as a viable nuclear threat)
would find overlapping similarities between the state’s initial case for
going to war in Iraq and its spinning of the (preemptive) tale of Iran’s
dangerous weapons programs.
6. At the time of writing, nearly 130,000 US troops are still sta-
tioned in Iraq (“Iraq Marks Withdrawal”).
7. The “current crop” included Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani,
Fred Thompson, and John McCain.
8. Channeling the rhetoric of the presidential candidate, Colbert
had this say about his moral guidance on issues like faith, gender, and
race: “On faith: ‘After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically
became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up.’ On
gender: ‘The sooner we accept the basic differences between men and
women, the sooner we can stop arguing about it and start having
sex.’ On race: ‘While skin and race are often synonymous, skin
cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad.’ On the elderly: ‘They look
like lizards’” (“I Am an Op-Ed Columnist”).
9. The absurdity of the statement did not go unnoticed by other
astute critics, appearing word-for-word in a Darrin Bell cartoon. In
it, Bell depicts a young man’s increased confusion and consternation
as he watches the speech on television (“The Cartoonist Group”).
10. On August 29, 2008 Senator John McCain confirms Sarah
Haskins’ prediction when he announced that Alaskan Governor
Sarah Palin would serve as his running mate.
11. McCain’s victory in the story underlies to some degree
Diebold’s ties to the Republican Party, revealing a number of con-
flict-of-interest cases that call into question the veracity of the elec-
tion results (“Company Connected”).
12. Concerns regarding ballet tampering, vote suppression,
computer/electronic electoral fraud have surfaced in a number of
recent book-length studies (see Charnin 2010; DeLozier & Karp
2006; Freeman & Bleifuss 2006; Harris 2004; Miller 2005; Rubin
2006).
13. The Onion’s critique of television news’ production values
finds its most perfect expression in a passage in Neil Postman’s
(1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he bemoans the use of
music: “All television news programs begin, end, and are somewhere
in between punctuated with music. I have found very few Americans
who regard this custom as peculiar, which fact I have taken as evi-
dence for the dissolution of lines of demarcation between serious
public discourse and entertainment. What has music to do with the
news? Why is it there? It is there, I assume, for the same reason music
is used in the theater and films—to create a mood and provide a leit-
motif for the entertainment” (102).
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