"The show you are about to watch is a news parody. Its stories are not fact checked. Its presenters are not journalists. And its opinions are not fully thought through."
News presented with a satiric and snide tone.
May be the entire premise of the series, or constitute one segment within a Sketch Comedy, such as the "Weekend Update" segment in Saturday Night Live, or the "Laugh-In News" on Laugh-In.
Note that, although some of these shows give plenty of useful information, watching one is less effective than reading a newspaper, a warning which Jon Stewart in particular works hard to make clear. Whether watching the "real" news shows that these shows parody is effective at all is more debatable.
A variation is the Faux News show or sketch, which satirizes elements of legitimate news shows but doesn't use factual information. The best examples are the British radio show On the Hour and its TV adaptation, The Day Today, both of which feature writing and acting by Patrick Marber, who was later nominated for an Oscar for Notes on a Scandal. The Day Today had its own spin-off, Brass Eye, which spoofed the Prime Time News format. The most famous Faux News outlet in the US, on the other hand, is not on television: it's The Onion (which uses a mix of real and imaginary events), which has spread its tentacles to the Internet and other areas, as well. In the age of the Internet, a Shallow News Site Satire will often spread News Parody.
Not to be confused with Kent Brockman News, a Show Within a Show parody of news shows, or (as "Faux News") with a common pejorative for Fox News Channel.
Examples
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Live-Action TV
- As noted above, the "Weekend Update" portion of Saturday Night Live, which has been a part of the show since the very first episode in 1975. Might be the Trope Maker or Trope Codifier for this genre.
- That Was the Week That Was, the British original (1962-63) and the American remake (1964-65), both fronted by David Frost.
- The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. (See the official Comedy Central site.
) Now that Jon Stewart has left, it's The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
- The Chaser's War On Everything
- The Half Hour News Hour was Fox News Channel's attempt to counter The Daily Show's perceived liberal bias with an explicit conservative bias. The show tanked and was canceled after a few months.
- Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld (The Fox News Channel's much more successful comedy offering. Hovers between News Parody, Faux News, and Fake Pundit Show [because it's like The View, if The View had a decidedly pro-Camp Gay bias]. Dissimile and absurdist tangents abound.).
- The Greg Gutfeld Show: Segments that parody Cable news are done very often on the show, such as jokes about a hive of bees running for president, and Tyrus being the press secratary.
- Not the Nine O'Clock News (one of the earliest dedicated News Parody shows, which went out at 9 PM on BBC2 directly opposite the real Nine O'Clock News on BBC1)
- Not Necessarily the News (modeled on the above though with no specific time reference, one of the earliest dedicated News Parody shows in the US)
- The Day Today, Chris Morris's surreal spoof of the style of news reporting.
- Have I Got News for You is considered to be the quintessential British version. It's more of a quiz/panel show than a News Parody, although there's plenty of fun-making about the news.
- Mock the Week is a Darker and Edgier version of the above.
- The news section of Top Gear, introduced initially as a three-presenters-on-furniture-scavenged-from-cars way to mention "boring but important cars" quickly. Has expanded somewhat to include car news, politics as it relates to driving, and the presenters poking fun at each other whenever possible.
- The Jeselnik Offensive, a very dark Comedy Central show hosted by infamously harsh comedian Anthony Jeselnik, which is mostly dedicated to mocking deaths and other tragedies from the news.
- Crossballs, a short-lived Comedy Central show that was a portmanteau of CNN's (now-defunct) Crossfire and MSNBC's Hardball. Often pairing up a revolving cast of comedians with actual experts as they argued with each other on the topic at hand.
- The Colbert Report, a Spin-Off of The Daily Show that was pitched to the network as Colbert parodying Bill O'Reilley.
- The Nightly Show, another Daily Show spinoff, parodies panel-style shows.
- CNNNN (Chaser Non-stop News Network): An Australian parody show spoofing CNN and Fox News.
- In English-speaking Canada, there's This Hour Has 22 Minutes and The Rick Mercer Report.
- And on the French side of Canada, La Fin du Monde est a Sept Heures ("The end of the world is at seven o'clock"), and Infoman have trended toward this at times (at other times trending toward light-hearted humorous commentary on the news, musical numbers, or out-and-out silliness).
- Jimmy MacDonald's Canada, with the added bonus of being set in The '60s and starring Richard "Albert Wesker" Waugh as Jimmy.
- Broken News does the Faux News variant, cutting between snippets of different styles of news show, such as "Look Out East" spoofing BBC local news broadcasts, a BBC News parody with presenters who keep interrupting each other, an ITV News parody skewering the channel's overuse of flashy graphics, an American network news parody that's usually oblivious to what's going on in the rest of the episode (and features Claudia Christian as one of the hosts), and several others, and frequently cuts between the various sub-shows in mid-sentence in a way that's supposed to represent a bored viewer flicking between channels. It's the Spiritual Successor to The Sunday Format, a radio series by the same writers that does much the same with newspapers.
- Les Guignols de l'Info is a French version of this trope using puppets. It aired at 8PM (the time of real news) and the anchor was based upon a real news anchor who worked for years on another channel.
- Another French version: various incarnations of satirical show Groland (especially the earliest ones) took the form of fake news shows.
- The Italian version is "Striscia la Notizia", a daily news parody who nonetheless manages to make also very serious points, exposing local cases of corruption and frauds which usually don't appear on the "real" news programs.
- In Germany: Rudis Tagesshow (1981 - 1987) and its Spiritual Successor Die Wochenshow (1996 - 2002).
- Since 2009 it's the Heute Show.
- Studio 3 has a kids' version in one of its regular segments, where it's two young hosts act as decrepit, old-fashioned news presenters.
- One of the recurring sketches in the Australian sketch show Full Frontal was Australian National Nightly Network News (ANNNN), which started in Series 2 as a series of short one-liners about the events of the week, but evolved in the third series as a complete news report, spoofing more segments and expanding the number of characters: newsreaders Ian Goodings (played by John Walker) and Norelle Parkinsom (Kitty Flanagan), reporter David Mc Gahan (Shaun Micallef), and weatherman Phil Toinby (Francis Greenslade, only in series 3). By the second half of series 4, only Ian Goodings stayed as a character in ANNNN, but the news parody continued until the end of the show, three series later.
- The Philippines had the Sic O' Clock News and Wazzup Wazzup.
- Indian news/media commentary portal Newslaundry has a series known as Clothesline, where the anchor, veteran journalist Madhu Trehan does this for news media, mostly television, crossing over with MST, by adding her own commentary. A more actual news parody is the series Newslaundry Lite.
- The Israeli Eretz Nehederet runs almost entirely on this format, alternating between mocking remarks about recent events in the style of Seth Myers on Saturday Night Live,note interviews with actors playing public figures, and skits in the formats of news reports.
- The Argentine show Caiga Quien Caiga (lit. "Whoever May Fall"), commonly shorthanded to CQC. Among other countries to which the format was imported, it is also very popular in Spain and Brazil (where the acronym stands for Custe o Que Custar, i.e. "Whatever It Takes").
- Chilean Show 31 Minutos, is half this, half Work Com with puppets!
- Older Than They Think local news example from the Twin Cities. For a decade in The '60s and The '70s; Minneapolis-St. Paul CBS station WCCO-TV 4 would air a satirical newscast titled "The Bedtime Nooz" using the station's on-air talent; including iconic news anchor Dave Moore and weatherman Bud Kraehling.
- Drop the Dead Donkey was a news parody in two different ways; it was a Work Com set in a newsroom, where many of the jokes were based around real news stories.
Music
- Lou Reed's "Sick Of You", which the book Between Thought And Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed described as a "fantasy newscast."
"All the beaches were closed, the ocean was a red sea
But there was no one there to part it in two
There was no fresh salad, 'cause there's hypos in the cabbage
Staten Island disappeared at noon
And they say the Midwest is in great distress
And NASA blew up the moon
The ozone layer has no ozone anymore
And you're gonna leave me for the guy next door?"
Radio
- And on BBC radio is the Panel Show The News Quiz, which is about 13 years older than Have I Got News and follows a different format. The host asks a question whose answer is current news to one of the four 'contestants' (usually comedians and occasionally politicians), who then proceed to mock that particular story. After each answer, the host will provide scripted mockery of that story (often involving puns), award points, and move on. Each round, a cutting from newspapers or online news will be read out, and the final round has no points awarded as each guest reads out their own cutting instead. These cuttings are generally sent in by listeners from across the country, resulting in some being from obscure local papers. The cuttings were dropped in the post-Miles Jupp era.
- BBC radio also provides the much more straightfoward News Parody The Now Show, where Hugh Dennis, Steve Punt and rotating guests (special or otherwise) thoroughly mock a news story of their choice. There is frequently, but not always, a musical segment.
- The NPR show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me could be considered an example of this.
- CBC's This Is That, a parody of CBC's current issues interview shows, like As It Happens. It features discussion of fictional current affairs along with outraged listeners calling in.
- Royal Canadian Air Farce
- On the Hour, the original radio version of The Day Today.
Web Original
- The Onion is a rare example of the News Parody in print. And, via its website and the miracle of streaming audio and streaming video, a News Parody of radio and television news as well.
- The Babylon Bee satirizes the news with fake parody stories from a conservative/evangelical angle. They've managed to become something of a Sitcom Archnemesis to the more left-leaning Snopes in the process, which cannot resist "fact-checking" even its most ridiculous articles.
- Radio Free Cybertron, a Transformers podcast, has a segment called "News From Cybertron", done from an in-universe point of view.
- A video on YouTube called "The World's Most Generic News Report" from British TV show Charlie Brooker's Newswipe. It breaks down a typical news segment exactly in a very funny way.
- News Biscuit is to Britain what The Onion is to America, albeit a bit less well-known.
- The Beaverton is yet another country's own parody newspaper, this time from Canada.
- Ministry Of Harmony is the Chinese version of The Onion; it even markets itself as such.
- A popular online parody that also appears in print (notably in some alternate newspaper markets), is The Borowitz Report. It was acquired by The New Yorker in 2012.
- The Headlies section of WrestleCrap, in a parody of less reputable Wrestling Newz sites.
- This was followed by Kayfabe News.
- Venezuela's El Chigüire Bipolar.
- Spanish comedy/satire website El Mundo Today.
- Mexican comedy/satire website El Deforma. They have a seccion for fake-sounding-but-actually-real news with a "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer specifically so they are not confused with its actual humor content.
- Colombia has the parody/satire website Actualidad Panamericana, which because of its serious-sounding name tends to have a lot of people sharing its contents.
- Mock The Dummy, which is a YouTube parody of conservative politics...with dummies.
- The Hard Times ("A very real punk news site") is a parody news website focused on punk and other music subcultures that also spoofs real life current events. It has several spin-offs: Hard Drive, which parodies gaming journalism and nerd and video game culture, and Hard Money, which parodies business and financial advice sites.
- Israel has The Daily Freiernote , an English-language website which focuses on satirizing the culture of Tel Aviv, especially recently immigrated English-speaking Jews.
- The Betoota Advocate is Australia's answer to The Onion.
- SusNews aka Suspicious News posts fake articles with headlines like "Pingu Dead After Shootout with Rival Gang" and "Mrs. Incredible says that she will start an OnlyFans".
Western Animation
- The Wrong Coast presents fake celebrity news through eccentric Claymation characters.
