From <i>The Daily Show</i> to <i>Last Week Tonight</i>: A Quantitative Analysis of Discursive Integration in Satirical Television News

Satirical news shows constitute an innovative hybrid genre that mixes regular and fiction. The discursive integration hypothesis posits the defining characteristic of satirical is fiction elements are integrated such boundaries between preexisting genres have blurred. current study quantitatively tests this on both long-running American as Daily Show more recent Last Week Tonight. We collected transcripts fifteen shows, eleven fourteen from 2018 (9,824,249 words). Transcripts were automatically tagged for over fifty linguistic features to identify register dimensions, patterns in unique genres, which we used determine presence integration. Findings revealed two-thirds indeed characterized by (which labeled “complete hybrids”), while one-third manifested through already existing opinionated “hybrid-genre echoes”). These two categories demonstrate importance hybridity across different shows.