Distilling Crises as Entertainment: The Depiction of the Ukraine, Eurozone, and Refugee Crises in Political Comedy

• In Event: Issues in Crisis, Risk, Disaster Comunication Research

Abstract

The news media’s coverage of international crises has often been criticized for taking a predominantly national perspective, resorting to official sources (indexing-thesis) and supporting the position of the own government (rally-effect). However, also political comedy shows take up on international crises. Since they follow a different logic than the news media they might provide a different picture of a crisis. This study examines how political comedy covers the Ukraine, Euro, and refugee crises and how the crisis frames correspond to the news media’s logic. To this end, three German shows were analyzed between 2014 and 2016. Findings reveal that the shows adopt the national perspective of the news media and tend to index the range of crisis frames used by them. With respect to the evaluation of the frames clear differences relate to the causal interpretations and blame attributions that are largely directed towards the own nation in the shows.

Authors

• Dennis Lichtenstein, Zeppelin U

• Cordula Nitsch, University of Duesseldorf