"Don't Boo -- Laugh!"
What Big Data Tells Us About Political Satire and Voter Engagement
“Here is the difference between you and I- I’m a comedian first. My comedy is informed by an ideological background…[But] when did I say to you I’m only a comedian? I said I’m a comedian first. That’s not only.” - Jon Stewart, 2011 (on a Fox Sunday Morning interview with Chris Wallace)
INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
In my research, I analyze the effect of late-night talk shows on viewer engagement in politics. As a lifelong comedian, I felt it only natural to combine my interests and write a thesis on political satire-- and my timing could not have been more on the nose. The 2016 Presidential Election that came right at the start of my junior year of college resulted in a late-night comedy show revolution. Political satire as we knew it was, in many ways, completely reinvented. And it has not gone unnoticed. From the May 2017 issue of The Atlantic: “Can Satire Save the Republic?” to the 2017 CNN special: “Late-Night in the Age of Trump,” few cultural spheres have missed the opportunity to analyze political satire and its power over the American people.
The sphere of political science is no exception. With voter turnout on the decline and apathy on the rise (Thompson, 2016; Hacker and Pierson, 2005), political scientists have lately turned to satire with questions and answers. But this begs the question: what exactly constitutes satire? According to researcher Hsuan-Ting Chen, satire is “entertainment-oriented political content that aims to criticize politics and reveal violations of social norms in an implicit and playful way” (Chen, 2017). Satire “magnifies the wrongs of government” and “launches an attack using the weapon of wit” (Poremba, 2008). This ubiquitous beast ranges from late-night talk shows to daily Onion articles-- and that’s just in our time period.
According to Penn State Political Science Professor Robert Speel, political satire is at least 2,400 years old and dates back to Aristophanes (otherwise known as the “Father of Comedy”) in 4th Century BC. We see it in writings about China’s Monkey King or the West Africans’ Eshu and Legba—no society, old or new, is devoid of political satire (Hooley, 2007). It is, according to Hooley, “simply one of the fundamental modes of human expression.” It is traceable, it is pervasive, and it is powerfully influential. It shapes our perceptions, our feelings, and our actions (Chen, 2017; Becker 2017; Hoffman and Young, 2011). Yet, while we know satire influences us, we still do not fully understand how and why. When Aristophanes wrote against gods and war in his satirical plays, how exactly did this influence the people’s opinions? What about the satire itself shaped a response?
The modern tools of data sourcing coinciding with a dramatic rise in Late Night TV (CNN, 2017) make for a perfect storm in which to study these age-old questions. In fact, there is already much research on the effect of political satire on voter behavior and perception of politics. Tina Fey’s interpretation of Sarah Palin on SNL, for example, actually made “young Republicans and Independents less likely to vote for John McCain” (Flanagan, 2017). Other effects of satire are enduring, like the fact that most people still believe that Fey’s famous line, “I can see Russia from my house,” was originally coined by Palin herself (Thompson, 2016).
But some research tells us troubling news. Scientists argue that because of its ability to elicit negative emotions and cynicism (Chen, 2017), political satire may actually hinder voter engagement. Even worse, viewers of shows like The Daily Show exhibit “increased confidence in their ability to understand the complicated world of politics” but diminished rates of political participation (Baumgartner and Morris, 2006). However, we see some evidence that the opposite might be true. Comedian Seth Meyers describes satirical late-night shows as changing into a form of “investigative comedy” that typically ends with a call to action viewers don’t just ignore (CNN, 2017). As Becker and Bode uncovered in their latest research, people flooded the FCC website with over 45,000 comments the day after John Oliver’s show covering the topic of net neutrality aired. The FCC website even crashed temporarily from the contact (Hu, 2014).
Much of the current research on the impact of satire exists before the age of Trump, in a time when late-night TV shared little resemblance with what we see today. It was once dominated by hosts like Johnny Carson who “chose punchlines over political attacks” and who were more interested in making jokes than “being part of the resistance.” Even in the age of Leno and Letterman, we see “light punches” and “silliness” as hosts held back many of their personal political beliefs (Itzkoff, 2017; CNN, 2017). The current age of late-night is highly politicized; it is difficult to turn on a “Daily Show descendent” like Colbert, Kimmel, or Meyers without finding some aggressive attack on Trump (one of which was so personal, an entire Twitter campaign using the hashtag #fireColbert erupted in 2016) (CNN, 2017).
Late-night viewers are no longer as interested in hosts like Jimmy Fallon, who is losing ratings rapidly and is accused of being “too soft” on politicians and politics in general (Itzkoff, 2017). Fallon says he wants his show to be a place where he can do “what [he] thinks is funny” and provide an escape for his audience-- viewers, as it turns out, don’t want that comedic escape anymore. The political climate is ridiculous enough on its own (My Opinion, 2017). Late-night talk show hosts could just repeat what’s been said on the news-- and they have-- to make a joke (CNN, 2017). Viewers want satirists to take a stance. They want comedic journalism.
Modern late-night TV is more journalistic in style than it has ever been before (Jones et al., 2012). NY Times “Best of Late Night” writer Giovanni Russonello says of John Oliver: “Pageantry for him is activism and I think that’s a part of our new reality. He’s essentially being a town crier and an advocate as well as a TV comedian.” (CNN, 2017) Perhaps because of this change, people are now watching late-night talk shows just as much as they are watching traditional news programs-- and research suggests people are being equally educated from both (Becker, 2016). This phenomenon makes the study of political satire and voter behavior particularly salient.
Political scientists and psychologists have taken a diverse range of slants on this issue, even those who agree that satire positively affects voters in some way. Some believe political satire elicits negative emotions like anger, which leads the viewer to engage in activism and political participation (Chen, 2017; Lee and Kwak, 2014; Bushman, 2002). Others believe it is the “anti-rhetoric” rhetoric of satirists, or their “non-politician-ness” that makes viewers more likely to listen to, engage with, or trust in the satirist’s message (Thompson, 2016). In many ways, this was the phenomenon we encountered with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Because he was a political outsider, Trump was admired by his followers as a “plain-spoken man” with the ability to “tell it like it is” (in the words of his Vice President, Mike Pence, at a rally in 2016). Voters didn’t feel like they had to leave their guards (and mental political fact-checkers) up with Trump, because they weren’t being spoken to by a politician at all (Thompson, 2016).
And so it is with the help of Google Trends and some social media data that I will support current research on how late night talk show hosts are encouraging voters to engage in politics. Whether it is because of their non-politician-ness or their use of humor to keep viewers mentally engaged, late-night talk show hosts are inciting change and activism in their viewers. If we can uncover this relationship more deeply, we may reach the core of American politics. We may even be able to find the ailment that will heal some facets of our failing democracy. Satire has lasted throughout the centuries because it is a powerful tool of information dissemination. Now that we have the tools with which to better study it, we must learn how to harness it (My Opinion, 2017).
METHODOLOGY AND DATA COLLECTION
Research like that of Chen, Becker and Bode, or Hoffman (the list goes on…) uses survey data to determine how viewers are affected by political satire. I find two main flaws with this form of data collection: a.) When a participant knows she is being surveyed, she may be more likely to pay close attention to the satire in question, leading to a skewed perception of gained political knowledge, and b.) Taking out external real-world factors like political climate at the exact time of publication could influence the saliency of the topics perceived or the agency felt to act on them. In short, surveys suck. But don’t take my word for it. A former Google data scientist with a PhD from Harvard already wrote a book about their shortcomings-- and an enticing alternative.
In his book Everybody Lies, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz explains the pitfalls of using surveys as a valid measurement of consumer behavior. He opens with one startling example about condoms. According to the GSS survey, women reported having heterosexual sex, on average, fifty times per year and using a condom 16 percent of the time. Added up, that’s 1.1 billion condoms used each year. But according to the same data set, men use 1.6 billion condoms each year. Those numbers would, theoretically, have to be the same. And yet, they’re not, and when we look at the number of condoms actually sold each year (as reported by market research company Nielsen) we come up with a meager 600 million condoms. So it looks like everyone is afraid to admit their naughty habits.
People lie in surveys sometimes on purpose, and sometimes even by accident. Often there is a social desirability bias that causes people to respond in such a way that hides thoughts or behaviors they might be ashamed of; other times, questions can be framed in ways that manipulate the respondent’s answers without the respondent even realizing she’s being manipulated (Berinsky, 2017). But there is a tool, Stephens-Davidowitz argues, that goes beyond any survey-- a tool so real, so anonymous, it allows us to see what people are really feeling when they think no one is watching. That tool, is Google Trends.
Google Trends is, I think, the most useful consumer analytics tool we have come across to date. Its vast range of Big Data goes beyond every survey question-- even beyond questions we haven’t imagined asking. When people tell the GSS survey they are having regular sex (up to 1.6 billion condoms-worth of regular sex), they go home and confide in Google with searches like “sexless marriage” and “sexless relationship” (Stephens-Davidowitz, 2017). The internet gives us a way to avoid the social desirability issue from surveys and helps us get to the answers we really want.
But on its own, Google Trends can sometimes provide vague conclusions with subjective interpretations. Stephens-Davidowtiz looks at the discrepancy of condom reporting by survey responders and mentions Google searches on lack of sex as the explanation for the discrepancy. But Seth, what if people are having sex, they’re just lying about how many condoms they’re using? While Stephens-Davidowtiz addresses this in his book, I believe it plays a more significant role than he lets on. As a woman, I know there must be an inordinate amount of “Am I pregnant??? I had sex without a condom!!!” searches out there. Google Trend data also only provides relative frequency of searches, not actual search count. And, the anonymity of Google Trends doesn’t offer us any insight into the actual demographics of individual searches. All demographic information is left up for interpretation by the scientist based on things like geographic location or use of keywords.
Social media, on the other hand, is totally not anonymous. It is a form of media solely based on crafting a personality around digital content. This is exactly the quality that makes it a useful tool for my research. Corroborating Google Trends with some social media analysis, I will approach some previously analyzed cases (like that of John Oliver’s Net Neutrality video) and some not previously analyzed cases (like Jon Stewart’s Zadroga Act video) in order to draw conclusions on the efficacy of late-night talk shows on eliciting engagement in politics. Social media trends will allow me to draw deeper conclusions and track specific viewer engagement.
My research rests on the same question many are trying to answer at this very moment: does watching late-night political satire induce online self-education or engagement in politics? But I’m going to try to answer it in a way that no one has really done yet. I’m using select Google searches to track online engagement with political issues brought forth by late-night talk show hosts, and I’m using social media trends -- like representative tags and hashtags -- to support the Google Trend data and extend its meaning beyond a bubble of anonymity. So when people watched John Oliver’s video on net neutrality, for example, they flooded the FCC website with comments. But did they blindly follow Oliver’s advice, or did they make a Google search to learn more?
Did Oliver’s speech make them ask “What is net neutrality?” or search the term itself for more information? Did it spark an emotional response with searches like “I hate net neutrality” or “I hate the government”? Did people go one step further and look up things like “how can I vote to stop net neutrality?” or “Who is my representative?”? These are questions we can answer using Google Trends. And to support them, do we see a rush of #netneutrality hashtags in social media posts? Do we see a flux of #callyourrepresentative? In other words-- does the issue being satirized go viral?
With each case, I try to analyze the efficacy of the satirist in engaging voters using multiple sources of data. Even Stephens-Davidowtiz says in his book, “The best way to get the right answer to a question is to combine all available data.” In fact, I will do exactly that. While my data analysis will not be exhaustive, it will be diverse. I will combine a variety of sources in order to corroborate some already existing claims, and hopefully come to some interesting conclusions of my own.
I begin my research by finding the ideal cases to study: those that are free (or free as they can be) of confounding variables that could get in the way of my research. Most satire on politics is created around the time of the inciting political event (aka its creative inspiration). For example, the day Anthony Scarmucci was fired by President Trump from his position as White House communications director, Seth Meyers satirized Scaramucci on his show. When analyzing Google searches for things like “Who is Scaramucci?” and “Why was Scaramucci fired?” in the days following, it is difficult to determine whether the sudden spike in Google searches is a result of viewers watching the news or political satire.
It is therefore more effective for my research to look at cases in which satirists discuss issues that are not as salient in traditional news at the particular time they are being satirized. To control for political events altogether, I tested the effect of satire on Google searches for a non-political subject. John Oliver mentions a fictional store called “Toys for Todds” on his October 15th episode of Last Week Tonight. The episode, predominantly about Equifax, mentions Toys for Todds offhandedly in one of Oliver’s jokes. It’s a fictional idea, not mentioned by other news sources or other satirists. In fact, upon a Google Trend analysis, I see no Google searches for the term whatsoever until Oliver’s show, after which we see sudden spurts of Google searches of “Toys for Todds.”
It’s clear from this analysis that, politics aside, satire leads people to perform Google searches on ideas mentioned by the satirists. According to Becker, this is because people want to be “in on the joke” and will therefore self-educate so they can “get it.” If this is true for non-political jokes, it should be true for political ones. In my research, I put this question to the test using two key dimensions. In analyzing the effect of satire on voter engagement, I study self-education and voter engagement. Self-education occurs when viewers simply seek information on ideas covered by satirists: “What is x?” or “Who is y?” Voter engagement occurs when a viewer goes a step further: “Where is my nearest polling center?” or “Who is my representative?” or “How do I stop z?” Voter engagement can also be measured by hashtag trends like #ImpeachTrump or #JustVoted.
The key is determining if and when these online trends appear as a result of the political satire. This is why selecting the right case examples to study is particularly important for the validity of my research. After studying this topic extensively, I’ve selected the following examples through which to analyze the questions of my research.
-------
CASE STUDY 1: Pre-Trump, Jon Stewart and the Zadroga Act
On December 8, 2015, Jon Stewart returned to the Daily Show as a guest to his replacement, Trevor Noah. The episode starts off with some applause, some jokes about Stewart taking the show back, some laughs; but suddenly, Stewart’s face is grim and he speaks directly. He tells Noah that there is an issue he cares about, but that he “doesn’t have a show anymore, and no one gives a sh*t.” Noah responds by allowing Stewart a few moments on The Daily Show to speak about this aforementioned issue. After a couple more jokes, Stewart looks directly into the camera and says:
Jon Stewart: So back in 2010, okay, after far more lobbying than should have ever been necessary, Congress passed what was called the Zadroga Act. [It] funded healthcare for 9/11 first responders who had gotten sick working at ground zero after-- funny story (audience laugh)-- the government told them the air was safe, it gave them cancer.
Trevor Noah: So you’re here to celebrate the anniversary. (audience laugh)
Jon Stewart: No no. They actually only funded the Zadroga Act for five years. They wanted to make sure the program wouldn’t have people who tried to cheat it, and that you could scientifically prove a link between the responders’ horrible diseases and the toxic air they they were breathing day in and day out working at Ground Zero.
Trevor Noah: I see and you’re here because they couldn’t prove the link
Jon Stewart: Well they actually, no, they proved the link.
Trevor Noah: I see, but there was a lot of fraud--
Jon Stewart: There was no fraud. (audience laugh)
Trevor Noah: So no reason to not renew it permanently…
Jon Stewart: You’re not from around here are you? (audience laugh) Of course there was no reason not to renew it permanently! But they did not renew it anyway! (looks into camera) It expired in September, it’s soon gonna be out of money. First responders, many sick with cancer, and pulmonary disease, have had to travel at their own expense to Washington, D.C. hundreds of times to plead for our government to do the right thing. (sits back) Plead!
Trevor Noah: Ah I see, so you’re here to tell us then that once Congress saw the first responders, vigor came in and they renewed healthcare funding and made it permanent. That’s what you’re saying, right? (audience laugh)
Jon Stewart: You’re not from around here… (audience laugh)
----
In the video, Stewart goes on to visit the capitol and speak with senators who didn’t sign the bill. He wants to see “if shame works.” The video ends when, after speaking with a representative from Ohio, the representative signs the bill. “Maybe shame does work,” Stewart says.
While Stewart does not make a direct plea to the audience to call their representatives, his sarcastic remarks on government and personal visit to the capitol show the audience the importance of the issue. The YouTube video even includes a link on the screen that reads “Tell Mitch McConnell to pass the Zadroga Act for 9/11 first responders” and links to a “Take Action” page that allows visitors to message their representatives on the issue.
It’s important to note some of the rhetoric in this video. Stewart butters up the audience with some jokes before telling them he’s serious about what he’s about to discuss. He then uses sarcasm and irony-- namely through the repetition of “you’re not from around here”-- to highlight the inefficacy and hypocrisy of the U.S. government. By doing this, Stewart preps the audience with a sense of frustration before hitting them with the “real talk” and call to action. Chen (2017) and Lee and Kwak (2014) would argue that it is exactly this feeling of frustration and anger that then led people to turn to activism on the Zadroga Act issue.
At the time of this video, virtually no one was talking about the Zadroga Act. People, for the most part, either didn’t know or didn’t care. When Stewart spoke on the Daily Show about this, people started “giving a sh*t.”
In the days after TDS aired, Google searches for Zadroga Act went up exponentially. It’s clear from the lack of searches before and after the three-day spike, that Stewart’s plea on TDS is likely the cause of sudden viewer interest in the Zadroga Act. To further support Stewart’s link with the spike in Google searches, let’s turn to some additional data. As it turns out, the most frequently accompanying searches in this time frame were:
#worstresponders (Breakout)
Zadroga act renewal (+200%)
Jon stewart (+50%)
These terms were searched by users who also searched for “Zadroga Act,” and indicate the relative frequency with with they were searched. A “Breakout” search indicates a term that had a “tremendous increase,” according to Google-- one that had little to no prior searches. In this case, we see #worstresponders is a Breakout term. Stewart coined the use of #worstresponders towards Congress in relation to the Zadroga act in a 2010 episode of TDS, when he first spoke about the issue on air. This evidence further supports the implication that Stewart’s monologue on TDS on December 8th, 2015 about the Zadroga Act caused the increased use of #worstresponders online in the days following.
So ok, we know people were Googling the term. That doesn’t mean they did anything else about it. I looked for data on some more telling Google searches that might indicate voter engagement beyond just self-education on the topic. As it turns out, there was a spike in Google searches for “Who is my representative” that was nearly three times what it had been the day before Jon Stewart’s appearance on TDS. The spike in searches for “Who is my representative” hadn’t been that high since November 20th, nearly one month prior.
Next I looked at Google searches for “How do I vote.” There was a significant spike for this search on December 8th-- higher than it had been in several months, in fact. Upon closer examination, however, it turns out the number one related query was “How do I vote for The Voice.” The Voice is an American television series akin to American Idol, where singers compete for a grand prize. This, unfortunately, made my data on this search moot for our purposes.
I tried other searches: “vote zadroga,” “call congress” (that one actually went down on the 8th) and something more general like “government” or “senate.” Nothing showed any significant spikes or dips. I looked back over my notes and decided to track the hashtag #worstresponders more deeply on social media. How many people were using the hashtag? How were they using it? And… who?
The hashtag #worstresponders is interesting because it gives out quite a bit of information:
This is a post about 9/11 (as the term “first responders” is culturally known to refer to those at 9/11)
This is a post about something bad (as the term “worst” indicates)
The hashtag elicits the same feelings of frustration and anger that Stewart and Noah make us feel in their sarcastic dialogue on government. The government should be passing this bill-- it should be listening to 9/11 first responders who are ill and knocking on their senators’ doors-- but in fact, it is not. The combination of wordplay on a heated, patriotic topic and the term “worst” pushes the reader to feel angry and, as Chen (2017) and Lee and Kwak (2014) would argue, turn to activism and engagement.
Upon closer examination of the actual tweets using the hashtag, we gain a better understanding of how the hashtag is used in context. Are people using it to complain, or to incite activism on their own channels? While many of the tweets were about bad customer service (“AT&T are the #worstresponders!!!” -- yep, I’m right there with you…), these are the top tweets using the hashtag.
Strikingly (to me, at least) was how many of them directly tagged their representatives in the posts. This illustrates a level of activism beyond a simple Google search. Here, we see people stepping out of their personal bubbles and going beyond a silly cat video or a witty retort. We see people directly engaging with the politicians who represent them. How effective this is, well, that’s a different argument. But the point here is that they are engaging in some form of political activism. Instead of marching on the steps of the capitol, people are sitting on their toilets and wearing out their “@” keys.
And while the hashtag’s frequency has diminished somewhat since December 2015, it has not gone unused. The hashtag has since been paired with issues beyond even just the Zadroga Act; in my research, I saw topics like women’s rights, abortion rights, gun control, and many others using the Stewart-coined hashtag. With the Zadroga Act, Stewart ignited a sense of passion that seeped into other realms of political activism. He did what protests alone could not always accomplish. Perhaps this is activism in the modern age.
But that was in 2015, and as we know, a lot has changed since then… namely, a lot changed on November 8, 2016. In the last year and a half, political apathy has skyrocketed, and cynicism towards the government has gained prominence (Thompson, 2016). Late-night talk shows have dramatically morphed into what Russonello describes as comedically driven political activism. For this reason, we need to shed light on political satire today. Whatever worked a year ago may not work anymore.
So now my research turns to two key cases in the post-Trump era of political satire. How have late-night talk show hosts ignited some of the fiercest engagement in politics our country has seen since the invention of the internet? When traditional news fails, how has political satire
rallied the troops? Or does it always?
----
“The problem you have with humor in America today, is that Hollywood is so enraged at Donald Trump, that they can’t be funny. All they’ve got is pure anger. They ain’t funny cause they’re too angry to be funny.” - former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich (Fox News, 2017)
CASE STUDY 2: Post-Trump, John Oliver and FCC Net Neutrality
As I mentioned earlier in this paper, satire is an ancient art. Many have successfully used its ability to “remove social cancers” throughout history. But, as Lindvall points out: satire aims to “correct and reform” by “slicing and dicing.” The satirist reveals the folly in the satirized in order to restore social order and establish some moral justice. Take Sebastian Brandt, a conservative Roman Catholic scholar from Basel in the rise of the 15th Century Reformation. In an attempt to reveal the “vice and folly” within the church, Brandt published Das Narrenschiff, a Ship of Fools, which describes a vessel too small to “carry all the fools [he] knows.” In this ship were bad parents, misers, gluttons, ostentatious church-goers, and those who are noisy at church. But a good satirist does not satirize as an outsider-- he is one of the affected. In his work, Brandt himself was a shipmate. He, too, was one of the fools ruining the church (Lindvall, 2015).
It is with a similar level of precision and relatability that John Oliver famously exposed the folly in our own U.S. government on the issue of net neutrality. Net neutrality is, in simple terms, a regulation on the internet. Without it, big corporations can slow or charge for certain websites. Imagine being forced to use Hulu instead of Netflix because your internet provider has a special deal with Hulu and therefore makes Netflix excruciatingly slow to use. Imagine a future without Hulu or Netflix at all but, instead, streaming services like “AT&T Go” or “Verizon Watch” (shudder). If you’re reading this in 2018, you may be thinking this is a recent issue. Unfortunately, net neutrality has been under pressure for quite some time. In an episode that aired in 2014, Oliver goes on a 13-minute rant about net neutrality, ending with a plea: “for once in your lives, focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction. Seize your moment, my lovely trolls!”
Just as Brandt held a mirror to the errors of church-goers’ ways, Oliver’s plea highlights the hypocrisy in the online viewer. People put so much energy into the wrong veins of politics-- these veins, Oliver implies, are not effective in enacting change. Oliver’s objective in this episode was to focus people’s energy on this important issue in order to actually induce change. And... it sort of worked. Oliver’s plea was followed by over 45,000 comments on net neutrality proposals and 300,000 emails in the special inbox section of the FCC site. The FCC servers ended up crashing in response to the high volume of comments on the issue and the FCC released this tweet:
Talk about #worstresponders. They can’t even handle reading the messages.
This case has been featured in The Washington Post, Time Magazine, CBS News, and many others publications. Scholars from various backgrounds-- including award-winning NPR correspondent Elise Hu as well as Communications Professor Amy Becker-- have written about this particular case because of the overwhelming response Oliver’s video elicited from its viewers. But there’s another reason it makes for such a great example to study: the viewers’ online communication with the FCC during this time period was so clearly in direct response to Oliver’s plea. It shows, without a doubt, that there is some measurable influence of satire on online voter engagement in politics.
But so far the research has been based in either speculation or experiment analysis. Becker’s work, for example, tests the impact of traditional news sources versus satirical news content by surveying respondents after watching a video clip. The study, which takes place in January 2016, uses surveys to determine how effective satire is at conveying news information as well as relative issue importance. But as I previously noted with unmatchable eloquence: surveys suck. Taking a clip out of context and asking a viewer how much knowledge she obtained from it is only half-effective. Using Big Data, we can bolster these claims and put them back in context. And we can control for any social desirability bias or other biases within the study.
I first looked at Google searches for net neutrality around the time of Oliver’s 2014 monologue.
The graph shows a significant spike for “net neutrality” searches after June 1st, the air-date of Oliver’s video. But it also shows a spike the month before. At first glance, it may be presumed that this issue is brought up by traditional news sources, which explains the other spikes in Google searches. Upon further analysis, however, the connection between Oliver’s video and viewers’ interaction with the subject of “net neutrality” becomes much more dynamic-- and telling. In the year that Oliver’s video was published, most of the people who searched “net neutrality” also searched “oliver net neutrality,” “john oliver,” and “john oliver net neutrality” (in that order of frequency).
In that same year, people who searched for “net neutrality” also searched the following topics (also in order of frequency):
1. John Oliver - British Comedian (Breakout)
2. Explanation - Topic (Breakout)
3. Last Week Tonight With John Oliver… (Breakout)
5. Whitehouse.gov (Breakout)
6. Supreme Court of the United States (Breakout)
7. Lobbying - Topic (Breakout)
11. Petition - Topic (+1,200%)
The second most frequent corresponding search with net neutrality was an explanation of the topic. This is striking evidence that Oliver’s video not only sparked comments to the FCC site, but that it also led people to self-educate on the subject of net neutrality. In an indirect way, this proves that late-night political satire can have a significant and positive effect on viewer knowledge of politics. Further, the 7th most frequent corresponding search was Lobbying, with Petition following closely behind in 11th place. Google gives us some perspective here: viewers who searched for “net neutrality” and “petition” went up over 1,200% in this time frame. This data, paired with the high ranking of “lobbying,” shows us that viewers actually turn to forms of political activism after watching political satire on select issues.
But this case study is labeled as “post-Trump,” and that’s because the story didn’t end here for net neutrality. If you’re reading this online, enjoy it while you can. As these recent YouTube comments on Oliver’s 2014 video so shrewdly point out, the good times with our internet freedoms may soon be over:
Reflecting Brandt’s ship of fools, it appears history repeats itself and we are all fools once again. It began when Donald Trump, a known opponent of net neutrality, was elected. Trump’s feelings about net neutrality were made clear in a tweet he published in 2014:
Once he was elected in 2016, he chose an opponent of net neutrality, Jeffrey Eisenach, as an aide on telecommunications and technology strategy (Leskin, 2017). Ajit Pai was appointed FCC Chairman, some things were said, some things were done, and in a landslide victory of 50 - 48, senators undid sweeping privacy rules established during Obama’s presidency (Leskin, 2017).
On April 26, 2017, Pai proposed his plan to repeal net neutrality (Leskin, 2017). In dire times like these, satirists turn to humor to induce activism. It is for this reason Lindvall calls the satirist a “slippery creature”-- one that “plays the role of a trickster, but with a purpose” (Lindvall, 2015). So on May 7, 2017, John Oliver used his comedy once again for the purpose of retaining net neutrality. With an official vote on the horizon, John Oliver likely recalled the fervor he ignited with his first net neutrality video, and made “Net Neutrality II,” a sequel to his original rant three years prior. His video spurred yet another public outcry over the issue, bringing it to the forefront of political discussion.
Upon looking at Google Trends data for “net neutrality” in this time period, we see expected results: a spike around April 26th, and again on May 8th after Oliver’s video aired.
We know many of these searches were spurred by Oliver’s video, because the most frequently related query was “gofccyourself,” which is the website Oliver created to make it easier for people to leave comments on the FCC site. Gofccyourself.com linked directly to the FCC website page related to net neutrality comments.
And comment people did. According to a recap video Oliver aired on May 14, 2017, the FCC site got 1.6 million posts regarding net neutrality--on all sides of the argument. This is an interesting point, as it shows us two things: liberal political satire engages both sides of the political spectrum, and it appears liberal audiences are not the only ones consuming liberal political satire. As Stephens-Davidowitz points out in his research, we often think the internet is dividing us politically. Republicans have often criticized the media (namely traditional news networks and late-night talk shows) for being too left-wing, which has spurred some antagonism towards satirists (the #fireColbert hashtag is a good example of this). But in reality, the media we all consume is not as different as we may think. Stephens-Davidowitz analyzed news consumption using Stormfront-- the web’s “first major racial hate site” according to Wikipedia. You would think the users of a white nationalist website would turn mostly to conservative sources for news. Surprisingly, Stephens-Davidowtiz found that Stormfront users were actually twice as likely to visit nytimes.com than Yahoo News.
As it turns out, conservatives don’t only watch Fox News, and liberals don’t only watch CNN. In an important moment of reflection, Stephens-Davidowitz also found that people are more likely to meet someone with opposing views on a website than they are at work, next door, in their family, or in their friend group. So the internet is, in a way, bringing opposing groups together. Stephens-Davidowitz hypothesizes that this is because in real life, we selectively choose to hang out with people we agree with-- and we typically maintain smaller social circles. On social media, we can have thousands of “friends,” some of whom are distant acquaintances that actually serve to expand our social diversity to networks we wouldn’t otherwise meet in person.
The point is, people are viewing opposing news media-- and the same is true for political satire. When Oliver asked his viewers to follow gofccyourself.com, he not only sparked activism in those who agreed with him, but also in those who disagreed. Some may argue that this kind of online activism (something Hersh denounces as “political hobbyism) increases polarity in the political climate. I don’t disagree there. But the sheer power political satire has in mobilizing both sides of an argument is immensely impressive. If we can somehow harness that power and manipulate it, we may be able to improve voter turnout for all parties, thus leading to a public opinion that is more accurately reflected in public policy. In a true democracy, the point is to bring all voices to the forefront and leave no opinion behind.
But there is one caveat to this whole section that I have failed to include. 128,000 of the comments on the FCC site were actually identical anti-neutrality comments, almost exclusively from spam accounts. So my idyllic “Republicans and Democrats talk things out to reflect public opinion after watching satire” dreamland comes down crashing and burning. While satire has sparked activism on both ends, the internet allows people of all opinions to exploit online platforms and manipulate public opinion representation. Public opinion representation is not how people really feel-- it’s a false representation of how it seems people feel, usually based on whoever has money and power and usually reflected in things like views or comments or public policy or (especially) presidential elections.
Online interactions are a double-edged sword for my research, because even though online accounts are easy to fake, they’re also easy to make. Anyone, rich or poor, can have her voice heard on social media, which is why I turn to Twitter for a portion of my research. In analyzing the hashtag #gofccyourself, there is a significant difference I see between net neutrality tweets and Zadroga Act tweets. Tweets using the #gofccyourself hashtag appear to be more more directly antagonistic and often violent-- specifically towards Ajit Pai. Perhaps this is because the Zadroga Act did not have a specific face to blame, and net neutrality does. Or perhaps it is because Ajit Pai is just that stupid and easy to make fun of. In any case, the sheer number of memes involving Pai smiling in front of the falling Twin Towers or smiling on a Pornhub template that reads “stupid little bitch fucks entire country for money” is astounding. On December 14, 2017-- months after the original hashtag was coined-- Twitter was flooded with tweets using #gofccyourself to express feelings regarding the repeal of net neutrality.
Another comparison to Stewart’s Zadroga Act rant is that Oliver’s rant never focuses on calling your representatives or writing a letter. The whole point of the catchy website is to drive traffic to the FCC site in the form of user comments. But, as we all know now, that didn’t end up amounting to anything more than an impressive number. The reality is, online activism does not directly translate to policy change. Here I pose a question that I think requires further research: what kinds of satire-created hashtags are most often paired with tagging of congresspeople? Does a hashtag like #gofccyourself make people more likely to comment on the FCC site but less likely to call their representatives? Because late-night satire is under such scrutiny by those who believe it’s making us dumber, more polarized, and less politically active, we need to think about what kinds of political satire are effective in inducing policy change. Oliver’s video created a big splash, no doubt, but maybe he should have steered his viewers towards more effective outlets of political frustration.
CASE STUDY 3: Post-Trump, Jimmy Kimmel and Healthcare
In the beginning of this paper, I mentioned some of the research behind what makes satire effective. According to scholars like Lee and Kwak and Chen, satire induces negative emotions like anger and frustration that then ignite a sense of activism in the viewer. This combination of anguish and laughter is a common theme in works regarding satire: as Lindvall says, “satire must cut to heal.” Satire stems from a feeling of discontent or frustration and, often, the greatest satire comes from the deepest suffering.
For example, ancient Jewish populations used wordplay and wit as they adjusted to foreign cultures. Their suffering led them to produce humorous Yiddish proverbs like “If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living.” (Lindvall, 2015) The Jews were so well known for their use of humor that the Qur’an “even denounced them for their puns.. [and] for their twisting tongues.” (Lindvall, 2015) Much like modern-day satirists, ancient Jews used humor to cope with injustice and stress by exposing the status quo and all its flaws. By exposing injustice, Jewish prophets created written work that “stung like a bee” and aimed to reshape the sociopolitical system in their favor.
This comedy through the suffering is what allows stand-up comics to relate to their audiences so successfully. It’s what makes all the painful clips from America’s Funniest Home Videos so hilarious to watch. Our sadness and our humor are inextricably linked, and late-night talk show hosts will often use an appeal to the audience’s emotions as a way to incite political activism. Jimmy Kimmel has one such example from his show Jimmy Kimmel Live in which he is actually brought to tears over the health of his newborn son, Billy. In the segment, Kimmel relays a detailed account of Billy’s birth, as well as the life-saving heart surgery Billy had to undergo immediately after. Kimmel is so overtaken by emotion during his monologue, he actually has to stop between sentences at some points. He brings out a sheet of paper and starts to recite names of people he is thankful for in the aftermath of Billy’s diagnosis.
It isn’t until 10 minutes into the video that Kimmel looks into the camera and focuses in on his attack-- this time, on the healthcare system--saying:
“And I want to say one other thing. President Trump last month proposed a 6 billion dollar cut in funding to the National Institute of Health. And thank God our congressman made a deal last night to not go along with that. They actually increased funding by 2 billion dollars and I applaud them for doing that, because more than 40% of the people who would have been affected by these cuts to the National Institute of Health are children and it would have a major impact on a lot of great places including Children’s Hospital Los Angeles which is so unbelievably sad to me. We were brought up to believe that we live in the greatest country in the world but until a few years ago, millions and millions of us had no access to health insurance at all….If your baby is going to die and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make. I think that’s something that whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat or something else, we all agree on that, right? Whatever party, whatever you believe, we need to make sure that the people who are supposed to represent us, the people who are meeting about this right now in Washington understand that very clearly. Let’s stop with the nonsense. This isn’t football, there are no teams. We are the team, it’s the United States. Don’t let their partisan squabbles divide us on something every decent person wants. We need to take care of each other… Please say a prayer for all the families.”
In his powerful speech, Kimmel condemns President Trump for his policies and points out the injustice in the American healthcare system. But he does more than that-- in an age of party polarization and “partisan squabbles,” Kimmel unites us on an issue “any decent person” can agree on. In an effort to incite activism in the face of apathy, Kimmel breaks down the political dividers and shows the humanity in government policy. But instead of telling people to reach out to their representatives, he tells his audience to pray for families in need. I wanted to see whether his story was still effective in causing online political engagement, even without a direct outlet (like Oliver’s FCC commenting link); so, I looked at Google searches for the term “healthcare” in the time surrounding Kimmel’s emotional video.
Surprisingly, the term “healthcare” only increased slightly on May 1st (the day the video was released), and it appears the term is searched consistently anyways. On May 4th, there was a dramatic spike in searches; the spike was even more apparent for “healthcare bill.” Upon further analysis, it was not in direct response to Kimmel’s video, but rather it was related to Trump’s proposed healthcare bill.
Even terms like “heart disease,” “donate,” and “children’s health” exhibited no significant spikes in search frequency. It appears, from a general Google search analysis, that when Kimmel told people to “pray,” they really just did that* (*To be fair, many people donated to the CHLA in response to Jimmy Kimmel’s plea. Which is awesome! But in terms of political activism, the data shows slim pickings). But luckily he didn’t stop there. In the following months, Kimmel made a series of segments on healthcare as he championed better funding. In a response video on May 8th, 2017, Kimmel thanks viewers for their donations to the CHLA and mentions some antagonistic responses to his emotional plea the previous week. He appears to reverse his original notion that we are all on “one team, the United States,” and takes multiple jabs at the Republican party. One direct insult to Kimmel came from former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich:
“The problem you have with humor in America today, is that Hollywood is so enraged at Donald Trump, that they can’t be funny. All they’ve got is pure anger. And then they think it must be funny cause they’re called comedians so they exhibit their anger as almost a pathology on late-night television and you’re supposed to laugh cause after all they’re comedians. They ain’t funny cause they’re too angry to be funny.”
You’re right, Newt. We are angry. Angry because, as Kimmel points out, the healthcare system is not currently designed to help everyone no matter his or her socioeconomic status. And as ancient proverbs prove-- the greatest humor stems from anger and frustration.
But one of the responses to Kimmel’s video is positive. A Louisiana Senator named Billy Cassidy says he wants the new healthcare bill to “pass the Jimmy Kimmel test”: in other words, would a child with heart disease be able to get everything he or she would need within that first year of life? The video ends with an interview with Senator Cassidy and a request for viewers to contact their representatives. Here we see two essential bits of late-night satire that have appeared in previously cited examples: a catchy campaign slogan and a command of action. The “Jimmy Kimmel test” serves a similar function to the #worstresponders and #gofccyourself hashtags, and the request for viewers to contact their representatives serves as the command of action.
Comparing this clip to Kimmel’s previous segment on the issue, we see Kimmel is much less emotional and much more directly engaged with the politics of the issue. He even interviews Senator Cassidy and grills him on his political stances. He also uses oppositional rhetoric against the Republican party, noting its inability to pass a bill that would help families in need get care for their children. This video is much more political, party-oriented, ethos-driven, and humorous (he cracks numerous jokes and makes snide remarks to expose oppositional members in their folly). I wanted to see how the response would differ after this video in comparison to Kimmel’s first, more emotional, clip.
Welp. It appears that Google searches for the term “healthcare” showed little to no difference between the May 1st clip and his more politically charged follow-up on May 8th. The same was true for phrases like “who is my representative” and “how to vote.”
But these terms were getting drowned out by the surrounding noise on the newly proposed healthcare bill. I needed to look at a term that suggested political engagement, but was separate from traditional news coverage. I needed a term specific to Jimmy Kimmel… and then I recalled Senator Cassidy’s mention of the “Jimmy Kimmel Test.” While “Jimmy Kimmel Test” showed few results, “Kimmel Test” did spike in the days following Cassidy’s interview. However, the searches were not nearly as significant as I expected. When comparing its frequency to searches for “gofccyourself,” I found that the “Kimmel test” was vastly less popular overall than John Oliver’s net neutrality catchphrase.
One theory rests on the fact that Oliver’s rant on net neutrality originally came in a time when net neutrality was not as popular on traditional news networks as healthcare has been. Perhaps on everyday issues that are brought up in the news all the time, late-night talk shows just have less of an influence. Maybe people tune-out-- regardless of who’s talking-- if they feel like they’ve heard about the issue before. Another theory is that Kimmel made general pleas for people to call their congresspeople, whereas Oliver gave a direct link through which people could comment on a specific issue, thereby making people more likely to act. Maybe if the satirist makes activism as easy and simplified as possible, viewers are more likely to engage with the the topic online. Or perhaps Kimmel’s originally non-partisan stance on the issue was unappealing. Maybe people need more in-group out-group dissatisfaction in order to act. Maybe polarity is, in some cases, what induces activism.
The thing is, there was an extreme spike in searches for the name “Jimmy Kimmel” on May 2nd-- one that we haven’t seen since. The most related query to that spike in searches was “jimmy kimmel son.” It’s clear that his May 1st video-- his emotional recounting of his son’s birth-- had a dramatic effect on Kimmel’s online exposure. But it is unclear whether his monologue actually translated into political engagement and activism from his viewers. Perhaps people were Googling Jimmy Kimmel after they heard that he cried on TV, and then they turned to other news sources in order to learn more about the issue. With my data analysis tools, it would be difficult for me to track that kind of engagement. But it appears that, for some reason, Kimmel’s video didn’t cause the kind of political engagement that Oliver’s net neutrality video did or Stewart’s Zadroga Act video did. The hashtag #gofccyourself has over 2,000 tags on Instagram. The hashtags #jimmykimmeltest and #kimmeltest have less than 40 combined. In all fairness, perhaps we cannot compare an apple to an orange-- the catchphrases served different purposes from the start. However, it raises the question: what makes some satire more effective at inciting political activism than others?
WHAT NOW? NEW RESEARCH AND SETBACKS
I went into this paper with many questions-- more questions than I could feasibly answer in one thesis. Questions like: Did Hillary’s appearance on comedy shows (like Between Two Ferns) make her more likeable? Do Presidential speeches with more jokes in them make the candidate more likeable? Do satirical news sources like The Onion make us dumber because people actually believe they’re true? Why is late-night TV skewed so liberal? Why does the right mostly use memes or fake news over late-night TV? Does fake news serve the same function as political satire for the right?
And while I ended up narrowing my focus to online trends based on late-night TV, I now feel like there are even more questions left unanswered: Which catchphrases by late-night hosts were the most popular on Twitter? Which late-night hosts led people to tag their congresspeople on Twitter more frequently? Does tagging your congressperson mean you’re more like to call your representative or vote? Is satire more effective at inciting political activism on issues that aren’t currently discussed in traditional news sources? Who’s doing the Google searches? Why do some online trends catch fire more than others?
Before I began my research, it was already clear that political satire had some influence on voter behavior. From making people believe that Sarah Palin herself coined the phrase “I can see Russia from my house” (Thompson, 2016) to causing an FCC website crash from comment overload (Hu, 2014), political satire has had an undeniable link to some of the most popular social media movements, digital wars, and public opinion shifts in modern day American history. One recent paper called Did Jon Stewart Elect Donald Trump? even found that Stewart had a significant effect on the results of the 2016 Presidential Election (Porter and Wood, 2017). Not surprisingly, my analysis of several cases on the issue and their corresponding sets of Big Data only strengthened the argument that satire has an effect on voter behavior.
But my research question runs a bit deeper than just “having an effect” on voter behavior. I set out to find whether satire has a positive effect on viewer engagement with politics via political self-education or direct online engagement with the topic being satirized. Overall (with some exceptions), I found that late-night talk shows lead to a dramatic increase in Google searches for the topic being satirized and often lead to other forms of engagement including direct tagging of congresspeople in social media posts, commenting on government agency websites, and Google searches for “who is my representative?” and topics like “petition,” “lobbying,” and “voting.” The relative increase in frequency of online engagement appears to relate to the previous popularity of the topic at hand. Topics that are not as salient in traditional news seem to garner more online attention when brought up by the satirist. Stewart’s mention of the Zadroga Act, for example, created a relatively bigger splash than Kimmel’s tearful plea on healthcare. A note for future research may be to analyze the relative efficacy among individual comedians-- is Stewart generally more effective than Kimmel at inducing political activism on the same issue?
It also appears that catch phrases that are “hashtagable” produce significant online traffic across multiple social media platforms. These hashtags (like Stewart’s “#worstresponders” and Oliver’s “#gofccyourself”) have an evergreen effect that allows them to be used months after their inception and on a variety of topics unrelated to the original use. #Gofccyourself, for example, was used well after Oliver first coined it, and it was at times used on social media as a general slam against the Republican party not just on the topic of net neutrality. Kimmel’s lack of a concise, hashtagable slogan could have been the reason we don’t see a significant spike in Google searches on healthcare following Kimmel’s clips.
But here’s the huge, glaring problem-- the problem that could also be the reason we don’t see Kimmel’s influence as clearly as Stewart’s or Oliver’s: Maybe I just haven’t been looking at the right Google searches. My entire analysis rests on the sheer luck that I chose the right Google search or the right hashtag to study. Because I can’t possibly go through every single thing Jimmy Kimmel has ever said about healthcare on his show and see which phrase made the biggest impact on Google Trends, I have relied on my own opinions and instincts to select what I believe could be the most influential. For any budding data scientists reading this: that is a terrible way to do research! It’s called cherry-picking, and it can produce results that inorganically align with the scientist’s agenda or hypotheses.
But fear not, budding scientists, for this is where you come in. Perhaps I don’t have the tools to analyze every single thing Jimmy Kimmel has ever said on his show and code each phrase for its relevance to healthcare-- but maybe you can. The future of Big Data is already astounding. Did you know there is a tool called Google Correlate through which anyone can see how various Google searches correlate with each other over time? It’s like the new and improved Spurious Correlations. Another incredible tool by Google called Ngram actually allows you to see the frequency of any word or phrase used in books over time-- some dating back to 1800! You can literally see how many times the word “peach” has appeared in books since the 1800s! (I’m going to go ahead and include that here. What do you think happened in 1915?)
The point is, this is only the beginning. Now that I have supported some prior claims with my findings and come up with some of my own, it is time for others to come in and debunk them using some bigger and better datasets and data sorting tools. Never in history has political satire been so widely disseminated and so intertwined with our public opinion. Never in history has data on our public opinion been so readily available and easily analyzed. In the words of science heartthrob and Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson: “We live on this speck called Earth -- think about what you might do, today or tomorrow -- and make the most of it.”* (*For the record, there were so many Neil deGrasse Tyson quotes I thought about putting here ironically instead. My favorites were probably “All the nine-planet people out there: Get over it. There’s eight.” or “The Pacific is the best toilet for satellites.”)
CONCLUSION
When Obama told the audience of the 2016 Democratic Convention “Don’t boo-- vote!” could he have also said “Don’t boo-- watch late-night satire, which will instill in you a sense of activism that will then lead you to become more educated on political subjects and potentially lead you to become more engaged in politics!”? I’ll admit, the former makes for a much better t-shirt design. But the fact remains: political satire has a tremendous influence on our engagement in politics and the way we feel about public policies.
Not only is it influential, but satire also appears to be more a part of our lives than ever before. If supply tends to match demand, then the sudden increase in late-night talk shows (The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and Last Week Tonight, to name a few) must indicate a dramatic increase in demand for political satire-- and not just as entertainment. Some research shows that people are actually turning more frequently to satire than traditional news sources for news consumption. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2014, Colbert Report viewers were more likely to turn to late-night talk shows than traditional news sources like CNN or ABC News for all news consumption, and 15% of viewers trusted the Colbert Report for government and politics information (Anderson and Gottfried, 2014).
Satire’s prevalence in our media consumption and its influence in our political decisions makes the subject of its impact all the more salient. It’s no wonder that, in the last year, the subject of political satire has graced the cover of The Atlantic and landed its own CNN documentary special. If the satirist really is a “trickster with a purpose,” as Lindvall says, we should be looking closely at how this purpose can be used to benefit society. In a nation pulled apart by polarity and frustration, could the satirist really heal the American people by ridding the political system of its “social cancers?”
What I have found through my research is that people make Google searches, tweets, and Instagram posts in response to late-night talk shows. And while this is indicative of engagement and self-education (particularly through some of the “breakout” related searches like “Petition” or “Topic”) my research by no means paints a full picture. It is very possible that an increase in Google searches on a topic leads to fewer in-person votes or decreased rates of phone calls to representatives. In an age where people can have entire second lives online, perhaps online engagement doesn’t actually amount to much in the real world, where attending rallies and signing petitions and showing up to the polls is what really counts.
This is a depressing realization, especially given the fact that I’m nearing the end of my conclusion. But I am hopeful that the power of the internet -- and the power of late-night political satire -- can be used towards something greater. What I have determined is a measurable influence of satire; now, we must harness that influence and use it to create a more politically educated society with higher voter turnout. And if humor really is our ailment toward a more unified nation, then there has never been a better moment in history in which to study it.
I will end my thesis in the same way the most effective satirists end each politically charged rant: with a call to action. Let’s promise to read more and troll less. Let’s turn Facebook comments into votes. Let’s make phone calls, not Twitter wars. If political satire is getting us engaged, let’s make sure we are engaged in ways that induce change. Let’s not turn comedy into apathy. On that note, I’ll even throw in an original hashtag: #satiredoftheapathy. And now, please do check out my Works Cited. There are many people much smarter than I am who have spent a great deal of time writing papers that would put this baby to shame.
Works Cited
Anderson, Monica, and Jeffrey Gottfried. “For some, the satiric ‘Colbert Report’ is a trusted source of political news.” Pew Research Center. December 12, 2014.
Baumgartner, Jody, and Jonathan S. Morris. “The Daily Show Effect: Candidate Evaluations, Efficacy, and American Youth.” American Politics Research. May 1, 2006.
Becker, Amy. “Late-night shows are trying to make voters skeptical of Trump. It’s probably working.” Vox, July 25, 2016.
Becker, Amy. “Satire as a source for learning? The differential impact of news versus satire exposure on net neutrality knowledge gain.” Journal of Information, Communication, & Society, February, 2017.
Berinsky, Adam. “Measuring Public Opinion With Surveys.” Annual Review of Political Science. May, 2017.
Bushman, Brad. “Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. June 1, 2002.
Chen, Hsuan-Ting, Chen Gan, & Ping Sun. "How Does Political Satire Influence Political Participation? Examining the Role of Counter- and Pro-Attitudinal Exposure, Anger, and Personal Issue Importance." International Journal of Communication [Online], 11 (2017): 19.
Flanagan, Caitlin. “How Late-Night Comedy Fueled the Rise of Trump.” The Atlantic, May 2017
Hacker, Jacob S., and Paul Pierson. Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy. (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2005) http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq0x6.
Hersh, Eitan D. “The Problem With Participatory Democracy is the Participants.” New York Times. June 29, 2017.
Hoffman, Lindsay, and Dannagal Young. “Satire, Punch Lines, and the Nightly News: Untangling Media Effects on Political Participation.” Journal of Communication Research Reports. April 22, 2011.
Hooley, Daniel. Roman Satire. (Illinois: Wiley-Blackwell, January 9, 2007)
Hu, Elise. John Oliver helps rally 45,000 net neutrality comments to FCC. NPR. June 3, 2014. http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/06/03/318458496/john-oliver-helps-rally-45-000-net-neutrality-comments-to-fcc
Itzkoff, Dave. “Jimmy Fallon Was on Top of the World. Then Came Trump.” The New York Times. May 17, 2017.
Jones, Jeffrey, et. al. “Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert Go to Washington: Television Satirists Outside the Box.” English and Cultural Studies Journal Articles. Paper 45. Spring, 2012.
Late-Night in the Age of Trump. Performed by Giovanni Russonello and Seth Meyers. 2017.
Lee, Hoon, and Nojin Kwak. “The Affect Effect of Political Satire: Sarcastic Humor, Negative Emotions, and Political Participation.” Mass Communication and Society. March 11, 2014.
Leskin, Paige. “Net Neutrality Timeline: 10 Events That Led to Dec. 14 FCC Meeting: Here’s What You Need to Know Before the Vote.” Inverse Innovation. November 26, 2017.
Poremba, Sue Marquette. “Probing Question: How old is political satire?” Penn State News, June 20, 2008.
Porter, Ethan, and Thomas J Wood. “Did Jon Stewart Elect Donald Trump? Evidence From Television Ratings Data.” October 26, 2017.
Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth. Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell us About Who We Really are. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017)
Thompson, Mark. Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017)