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Facts are optional, laughs are not!
Do you have a right to be fooled?
In Introduction to Satire, Leonard Feinberg defines satire as “a playfully critical distortion of the familiar.” One way that people create satire is by playfully distorting our ideas of the news: think mock television newscasts like Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update or fictional online news sites like The Beaverton. When people play with the news this way, it becomes satirical “fake news.”
Satirical fake news goes back to at least the 1640s. Back then, it wasn’t called fake news, but it looked a lot like it. To enliven coverage of the English Civil War, satirists would embellish reports on the conflict. The basic idea underlying this 17th-century approach to playing with news—that is, stretching truths—lives on today.
This issue of The PLEA helps us make sense of the modern landscape of satirical fake news. It explores the many meanings of the term “fake news,” introduces popular sources of satirical fake news in Canada and abroad, discusses some reasons why satirical fake news can fool us, and considers if laws are needed to help rein in the sometimes fun but sometimes dangerous phenomena of fake news. Suitable for most any reader, FAKE NEWS! fulfills several indicators in Saskatchewan’s Media Studies 20 curriculum.
Do you have a right to be fooled?
