Speaking truth while telling jokes: Greek satirists’ meta-discourse and self-positioning in satirical newscasts

Abstract

This article examines how Greek satirists who produce and present television and online satirical newscasts legitimise their work at the intersection of journalism, humour and political advocacy. Focusing on programmes that mimic the format and aesthetics of newscasts, it situates their self-understandings within Greece’s Polarised Pluralist media system, shaped by prolonged crisis, low institutional trust and contested media freedom. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with six presenters, the study analyses their meta-discourse and self-positioning regarding genre definitions, professional identity, motivations and perceived roles in the public sphere, with a focus on producers’ self-understandings. Findings show that participants embrace a strongly critical, often Juvenalian style that they frame as morally warranted by perceived corruption and media capture. While rejecting the professional label of journalist, they portray their shows as both complementing and, at times, substituting for mainstream news, emphasising routines of verification, documentation and evidential display. They define objectivity in terms of method rather than neutrality, and describe their work as advocacy on behalf of “ordinary people,” while remaining sceptical about their capacity to change political behaviour. Importantly, they also describe pressures and costs associated with sustained critique addressed to political and media power, including professional precarity and reputational attacks. Overall, the study highlights the democratic potential, and the ambivalences, of satirical newscasts in a polarised media environment marked by distrust.