The Rise (and Fall?) of Satirical News Websites

A short overview of the state of affairs in online satirical news websites

Are we witnessing the decline of Satirical News Websites, such as The Onion? I am not interested here in the quality of their satire or humor, but in their capacity to attract people willing to start a new publication, and their capacity to continue publication. In short, how vital is the area?

Let’s start from fake news, which was invented  by the Italians (who else?), according to  a thesis advanced by Politico (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/fake-news-history-long-violent-214535/). If we consider that journalism started in Italy as well (the word “gazette” comes from the Venetian coin (gazzetta) which was the price of the first newspapers), then this does not seem a far fetched idea. So fake news obviously pre-exists the internet. In fact, it is probably as old as journalism itself.

But what about satirical news? It’s probably just as old, see for example, a case in 1722, in which “James Franklin, publisher of the New England Courant, was imprisoned for a month for printing a satirical news item suggesting Massachusetts authorities were slow in taking action against coastal pirates” (Smith, 1984, p. 98). For the record, Franklin was undeterred and in 1723, he had to flee Boston to avoid arrest, after publishing more satire, including a verse parody of his own trial. Magazines dedicated to satire and the news have existed for a very long time, see for example in Italy L’asino founded in 1892 and shut down by the fascists in 1925; or in France the Canard Enchainé, founded in 1915 and still running.

Most significantly from our contemporary perspective, satirical news found a very rich niche on TV, as early as the 1960s. Shows such as the British That Was the Week That Was (1962-1963),  and Spitting Image (1984-1991) and in the US Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1968-1973), Saturday Night Live (1975-ongoing) featured satirical takes on the news, such as the Weekend Update segment on SNL. However, the true golden age of satirical news started roughly with the Millenium. The Daily Show, since the moment John Stewart took over from Craig Kilborn in 1999, focused on political and news satire. The Daily Show’s influence is hard to quantify, and goes well beyond the domain of this work, but it was quite profound. In fact, most of the discussion around the Daily Show’s influence compares it to serious news shows. Other satirical news TV shows include The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, on Comedy Central (the continuation of Stewart’s show), Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, on TBS, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and Real Time with Bill Maher, both on HBO, Late Night with Seth Meyers, on NBC, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, on CBS.

The move online

Obviously, printed satire was also still going strong. For example, National Lampoon (1970-1998) was a print humor magazine, which contained much satire as well. The Onion started out as a print newspaper in 1988 and on the internet in 1996. It discontinued its print edition in 2013. The Onion was extremely successful and was made the object of much academic discussion (e.g., Kaye, 2010). Another magazine that went on the internet was Cracked Magazine, which was started in 1958. It moved to the internet in 2005. So it seems that satirical news magazines followed the Onion’s move online. In this sense, satirical news followed the more general trend for news media to move from print, to radio and television, and eventually to the internet, in the 1990s. So it seems fair to say that satirical “fake news” came into its own when its reach was amplified by social media and virality. This pattern seems to be more or less general: the only exceptions I came across are Punch and Le Canard Enchainé, which have web pages, but are not available on the web.

As I was researching this topic I came across several resources. Many libraries created pages to help students and other patrons distinguish between satirical news and plain fake news. These were helpful, but two resources stood out: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satirical_news_websites) lists about 70 satirical news websites. The web site Media Bias / Fact Check (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/satire/) provides a list of 82 satirical news web sites, and assesses them for various factors, including left/right bias.

There is a surprisingly low degree of overlap between the two lists, since the merged lists yield about 132 entries. It should be noted that I also added a few entries they had both missed. I proceeded to annotate the list for country of origin, starting date, operational status (in other words, are they still publishing?), and left/right bias. The latter was almost exclusively based on the Media Bias / Fact Check and my assessment of the publication. Because of this, I limited the political bias assessment almost exclusively to the US publications, since doing so outside of the political context I am familiar with would have been impossible. The following figure gives an overview of the starting dates listed in the comprehensive list (note that for 8 web sites I could not locate a founding date)

.The data show clearly a worldwide increasing trend from the mid 1990s until 2015, followed by a significant cooling down, especially in the past four years (the last four bars). The column on the left indicates how many web sites were started in that year.

Is online news satire dying?

As I was researching the web sites a trend emerged, with a more negative picture: while there still are many web sites that are functional, the list of defunct or hanging-by-a-thread web sites is long; for example:

http://bigamericannews.com

http://www.cap-news.com

https://empirenews.net

https://nationalreport.net

http://sportspickle.com/

http://RealNewsRightNow.com

http://dailycurrant.com [web site no longer available]

The lightly braised turnip [web site no longe active]

https://www.thenewsnerd.com [no longer satire]

Newshound [no longer satire]

https://huzlers.com [no longer satire]

http://elkoshary.com [no longer active]

https://demyx.com [no longer active]

https://en.mediamass.net [no longer satire]

Faking News [closed 2020]

So, I wondered if satirical news online may be dying. Overall, 46 out of 132 entries on the list were no longer active, although many still have web sites, but they have not been updated in years. That’s slightly over 33%, which seems ominous.

Do the data show that the heyday of online satirical news sites is over, in the US? From the data I could identify 74 satirical news web sites in the US for which a founding date was available. I was unable to determine the founding date of four web sites which are thus omitted from this chart. I thus plotted the frequency with which satirical news web sites were created. As we can see in the Figure below, the peak founding period for satirical news websites was between 2005 and 2015. The general trend (blue line) has turned negative. Less satirical news websites are being started. For example, only one web site dedicated to satirical news has been stated in the past two years, it is called The Takeoff Nap (http://takeoffnap.net) and it features hard-hitting satirical news such as “TSA considering changing the 3.4 oz liquid rule to 3.6 oz”.

It is is apparent that the positive trend in the creation of more web sites lasts until about 2015, with a peak in 2018 and then falls very significantly (and unexpectedly, one may add, since this coincides with the pandemic years and one would have predicted that there would be more demand for web sites of any kind and entertainment ones particularly).

Is there a correlation between political bias and likelihood of stopping operations?

I then moved on to consider political orientation. There has been a significant shift in the world of satirical news. As Sienkiewicz & Marx (2022) argue, satire, once believed to be more or less exclusively a progressive/left wing operation, has been recently colonized by the right. Do the data reflect this fact? We find 10 satirical news web sites that can be labeled as right-leaning. Half of them are no longer active. Forty-five websites were identifiably left-leaning, of which 10 were no longer active. First, we confirm the claim that right-wing news satire is now available. Moreover, we can also confirm that overall it is a very recent development: out of 10 web sites that were identified a right-leaning, only 3 were created before 2015 and one of them is no longer active. So, we can conclude that right-wing satire, while now present, does not outnumber left-leaning satire and it does not seem particularly more vital, since 50% of right wing sites have ceased activities. A caveat must be noted that my sources may undercount right wing satirical news sites.

Are there differences between the US and the rest of the world, in terms of online satirical news?

If we contrast the raw numbers of satirical news websites starts in the US (Figure 2) with those in the rest of the world (Figure 3)—while keeping firmly in mind that our sources are US-based and so probably underreport non-US web sites— a few conclusions appear. The most obvious one is that there are fewer overall starts outside of the US. The data include 78 starts in the US and 55 outside of the US. If we look at the English-speaking world, the difference is even more stark: 103 of the starts took place in an English-speaking country: UK, New Zealand, Australia, etc. If we consider that some of the web sites that are in English speaking countries are still produced in English or have an English edition, we can say that most satirical news web sites are in English.

The second thing that is fairly apparent is that the US was the clear leader, until at least after 2005. Then the rest of the world catches up and even overtakes the US in some years (e.g., 2009, in which only one start is recorded in the US but five world-wide). Finally, the same decline in the number of starts can be seen in both charts with however an even more abrupt drop to zero outside the US before 2020.

Conclusion: changing times

In conclusion, paraphrasing one of the fathers of satirical fake news, Mark Twain, the reports of the death of satirical news on the web would be greatly exaggerated. There is still a stunning amount of satirical news web sites, available in the US and worldwide. Moreover, another trend seems to be emerging: there is a significant number of web sites that focus on niche satire, such as sports, air travel, the mennonites, the military, the medical profession, and of course glocal web sites that focus on a specific community, e.g., a university, such as the Lemonpress, based at the university of York (https://thelemonpress.co.uk), but also address global issues, such as the Tory leadership election.

References

Kaye, S. M. (2010). The Onion and Philosophy: Fake News Story True, Alleges Indignant Area Professor. Open Court Publishing.

Sienkiewicz, M. & Marx, N. (2022). That's Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them. University of California Press.

Smith, J. A. (1984). A reappraisal of legislative privilege and American colonial journalism. Journalism Quarterly, 61(1), 97-141.

Note:

I intend to post the comprehensive list of satirical news web sites as a searchable, downloadable file as soon as I figure out how to do it. My plan is to do periodical updates. I would appreciate suggestions for inclusion, corrections, and more general feedback. I would particularly appreciate entries from countries that have been missed.