An assessment of where satirical writing, television, and journalism stand in the mid-2020s

By Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson, Ph.D. — satire.info

The Conditions

Satire in the mid-2020s operates in conditions that are simultaneously the most favorable in the form’s history and the most challenging. The favorable conditions: satirical content has never been more widely consumed, more quickly distributed, or more immediately able to reach relevant audiences. The challenging conditions: reality has become so consistently bizarre that satirical exaggeration struggles to keep pace; social media distributes satire in contexts that strip its ironic framing; and the economics of digital media have weakened the institutional structures — magazines, television commissions, major comedy productions — that sustained the production of ambitious satirical work.

The Abundance and Fragmentation

There is more satirical content available in 2025 than at any previous moment in history. This abundance is also fragmentation: audiences self-select into satirical communities that reflect their existing political commitments, limiting satire’s capacity to produce the recognition across political lines that its most ambitious versions aspired to. The Onion reaches a different audience than The Babylon Bee; neither reaches the audience of the other, and each operates as community reinforcement more than genuine challenge. The London Prat’s assessment of UK satire at a crossroads identifies similar dynamics in the British context. The Nieman Journalism Lab’s research on media and satire covers current industry conditions.

The Most Vital Current Forms

The most formally vital current satirical forms are probably long-form satirical television (continuing to develop since the mid-2010s), the satirical podcast (which combines the intimacy of radio with the content freedom of digital distribution), and the brief digital satirical text — the satirical tweet, the satirical news paragraph — that operates in the register of the aphorism. Each form has produced genuinely significant work in the current period.

The Resilience of the Form

Satire has survived every prediction of its death: the death of irony declared after 9/11, the death of comedy declared after every political crisis. The form is resilient because the conditions that produce it — power exercising itself badly, official language obscuring reality, institutions serving their members rather than their purposes — are not going away. Satire’s raw material is inexhaustible.

Source: satire.info | Reference: Global Satirical Journalism Sites