”Critical Parents Against Plaster”

Abstract

In this study, I propose to regard written news satire as a vital vehicle in combatting scientific disinformation. But in order to do so, we must examine the construction of spoof news. How does written news satire convey its social criticism by way of language, discourse and style? And what happens to the content? My case is a spoof article of the 1998 MMR vaccination scandal as rendered in the Danish news satirical website Rokokoposten (2015). The analysis is based on Jakobson’s communication model (1960), Raskin’s semantic model of humour (1985) together with Ermida’s (2012) and Simpson’s (2003) analyses of the discourse of satire. To this will be included a novel approach which regards satire as a kind of intralingual translation. Thus, this paper sheds light on the issue of the news satirist as a knowledge broker.