This week, being week 5, we were focusing on Fake News, Infotainment and Discursive Integration. The reading for this week, pages 259 – 276 of Geoffrey Baym’s The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism chooses to focus on The Daily Show of an an example of ‘discursive integration’, a term I had not heard before until this reading. After reading this week’s reading I would define discursive integration as the blurring of boundaries between different genres, formats or categories. In the reading, Baym states that The Daily Show is discursive integration as its format is situated somewhere between news, entertainment, public affairs and pop culture. Which seems to be a very fitting description of the show.

In class we then were tasked with coming up with jokes for a Clive Palmer article in breakout rooms. This proved a valuable exercise as it was our first experience actually trying to replicate being apart of a satirical news show. Up until this point, we have just been analysing satirical news shows and fake news (apart from our first assignment of writing a satirical news article) so this was a good start in trying to write for a satirical news show.

We were then set with the task of creating a pitch for our comedy news show ideas that will eventually be produced. I started ideating what to pitch by listing out news stories I was interested in. China’s influence on Australian Universities, the aged care facility fiasco and Victoria’s stage 4 lock down were all news stories I was thinking of pitching, but I decided to choose the news story that Ellen DeGeneres is actually quite a toxic person as I felt it has a lot of comedic potential. I also decided the format of the show I’m pitching to be a parody of morning news television’s entertainment news segments, like Sunrise’s for instance. I chose this format as I wanted to parody an Australian show, as even when they are being sincere, they can be unintentionally funny which creates a lot of comedic potential. I also chose this parody format as I want to try and move satirical news shows away from the ‘man-in-suit-behind-desk’ format that seems to be so prevalent in the genre.