The Chaser Report - Do Satirical Podcasts Solve Anything? | Sami Shah

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

As part of his PhD research, soon-to-be doctor Sami Shah put together a comprehensive investigation into a topic very dear to our hearts: the actual value of satirical podcasts. In this snippet from his pod-doco, Sami hears from satirists from far and wide, including Andy Zaltzman, James Schloeffel, Alice Fraser, Dan Ilic, and someone by the name of Dom Knight. If you would like to hear this full episode, check the link below!Listen to Sami Shah's podcast doco here: https://shows.acast.com/news-weakly/episodes/news-weakly-196-not-talking-bout-the-revoluion---Listen AD FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to the Chaser Report. A special episode today, a documentary by soon-to-be Dr. Sammy, hello. Hello. Now, you love news satire, you love satirical podcasts, and yet you decided to investigate whether they actually change anything or have any impact or counter-journalism. Why would you do that to yourself?

Well, mainly because I'm full of self-doubt and self-loathing and the best way to explore both those issues was to do a podcast about the thing that I love and seeing whether it holds any value to the world. Yeah, it's a great podcast, documentary. I think so because I made it, but also I think so because you're... Oh, yes. Well, that's, of course, the reason why I'm going to put it on our feed just through sheer narcissism. But now, look, I'm assuming that if people are listening to The Chaser Report, they either love something resembling comedy-slerical podcasts or they hate listening to this. And in either case, I think they'll enjoy the podcast. Sammy, have you yet heard whether you're getting the PhD?

Is this documentary we're about to hear worthy of doctoral status, of academic glory? I'm still waiting to find out. So either this becomes my crowning achievement or my Hindenburg. We'll find out. When I started Newsweekly, I thought I was just doing therapy for me. Maybe a little for you. Maybe a little for anyone who wanted to hear about the apocalypse, but with jokes. But then I did something else.

I went back to university and did a whole PhD and turned this podcast into a research project. So, for three years, I made episodes of Newsweekly, interviewed some of the best satirical newsmakers in Australia and abroad, and asked more than 200 listeners what the hell they think they're doing trusting comedians. One listener summed it up like this. It may not fix anything, but at least it named the rot. That's more than most knows does. So that's what this documentary is.

30 minutes to answer one big question. Is news satire a kind of journalism? And if it is, what kind of responsibility does that dump on schmucks like me? Before we get to the podcasts and Patrions and Parassocial relationships, let's remember that news satire didn't start with podcasts. So here I am, Assam Bin Laden, staying 10 meters away from Bush's Hotel. So what do they do? They arrest the other guy.

Because the front fell off and 20,000 tons of crude oil spilled into the sea court fire. It's a bit of a giveaway. I just like to make the point that that is not normal. Oh my God. Your campaign got blown up

by Jimmy Carter's grandson? I know she might seem, can't bear. But for a Pinterest user, that is white-hot rage. She is seconds away from knitting a full-blown manifesto. decades, news has had a comedy shadow. Cartoonists, sketch shows, fake news readers, they all do this weird thing where they dress up like proper journalists and then refuse to act like them. On Crossfire,

John Stewart basically walked onto a very serious looking set and called the whole thing out as K-fabe, political debate as just theater, everyone playing a character instead of having an honest argument. This, you're doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great. It's not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. On HBO, John Oliver spends half an hour on things like bail reform, hospice care,

and organ donation, and still insists last week tonight is... In general, it is just a rigorously researched comedy show, both because we want it to be right and for self-preservation purposes, we don't want to be sued. into oblivion. Because sometimes comedy really is, in his words, best most illuminating way to talk about them. Australian TV had the Gilles report, a CNNNN, N, the chasers warn everything and mad as hell. If journalism is the polite press conference, satire is the heckler at the back of the room. But what happens when you take that heckler and give them a podcast feed? For me, the answer to that question arrived in 2007.

Audio newspaper for a visual world. It was the first news satire podcast I'd ever heard. Just two comedians, John Oliver in New York and Andy Zaltzman in London. No huge writing team, no TV studio, just jokes about the week's news down a crackly Skype line. Our old producer Tom, he used to wear an after shave made of wolf piss. Yeah. That's why he had to emigrate. Because the Australians love it.

Muring wolves and are impressing the ladies. Oh yeah. writes Heather a lady. Listening to the bugle made me think, oh, maybe I can do this too. And a quick bit of context about why I care about this stuff so much. See, I didn't start in comedy.

I started in Karachi, Pakistan, working in newspapers, radio and television, trying to say as much of the truth as you could under a military, religious, and political system that really preferred you didn't. After a while, though, the only way I could say what I actually thought was to stop being serious.

on purpose. I slid sideways into stand-up and satire, because jokes could sometimes get past sensors that straight reporting couldn't. Then I discovered the Daily Show in America and this weird, angry little news satire podcast called The Bugle. It felt like someone had opened a door between journalism and comedy and gone. You can stand in the doorway, if you like. Eventually, I ended up in Australia doing breakfast radio on ABC, writing columns for the age, the Brisbane Courier mail and the Saturday paper and still sneaking jokes into the margins. But the questions never went away. When I put on my journalist hat, what am I not allowed to say?

And when I put on my comedian hat, how much do people actually believe me? Newsweekly is basically the messy child of all of that. Journalism, stand-up, a Pakistani upbringing, an American university education, an Australian media career, and a podcast mic that I bought on eBay. But for me, it always goes back. back to The Bugle, the founding news satire podcast. The moment the heckler in the back of the press conference stole a microphone and started their own thing. So we'd done quite a lot of stuff on Radio 4.

The problem with that was, you know, we'd do a series and then we'd have to wait for it to be recommissioned. It might get another series the next year or two years later or it might just be cancelled. This is Andy Zaltzman, co-host of The Bugle that he started with John Oliver in 2009. So, but it wasn't really that we chose podcasting. our agents basically presented it to us. So we've got you this deal to do a podcast and it was via the Times newspapers website, Times Online.

But what became really clear very quickly was how potent it was as a medium podcasting because people listen to it in a very active way. You don't sort of accidentally generally have it on in the background like you might with the radio. You've sort of chosen to download something. And therefore you have a sort of a greater, commitment from the audience.

So quite quickly, having started it, I realized what a great medium it was for comedy. So while TV satirists were still arguing with network executives, Andy and John were quietly writing a full-fledged comedy news show every week for people who had actively chosen to listen. That mix, though, of global stories with brutal jokes and this weird intimacy of a voice in your headphones is exactly the DNA that runs. through shows like News Weekly. See, satirical podcasts are a slightly different beast. You're not watching a bloke in a suit behind a desk,

you're listening to someone in a cupboard, probably wearing track pants, whispering straight into your brain through headphones. That intimacy changes what satire can do. It's less late-night monologue and more friend who will explain the budget to you and also say the word cluster fuck a whole lot of times. times. And the people making these shows do know that. See, to figure out whether satire is

journalism, I asked the obvious people, the satirists. Satire is all about exposing the logic of something or the intent of something in an attempt to get at the underlying truth of a situation, of a story of a reality. But, and there's also opportunity for new satire to look at broader themes, underlying truths that span years. But my feeling is that topical satire really should be as topical as possible as long as there's that happy medium of having a good joke to make, a funny joke to make, but also a revealing joke to make

that actually says something important and worthwhile about a thing. That's Dom Knight, long-time chaser, human, and host of the Chaser Report. He doesn't say he's a journalist. but listen to that. Exposing the logic, underlying truth, understanding a situation in a new way. That's pretty close to a job description for journalism. Then there's James Kloffel, founder of The Shovel

and co-host of its satirical news output. There was a story last year where, I have to get this headline right, but it was, remember when during the Olympics, there was that whole fuss about that scene that supposedly made fun of The Last Supper? We're mocking Christianity, including drag queens, parodying the Last Supper. And now a U.S. tech company has cut ties with the games over that opening ceremony, and a Catholic bishop has gone viral for this reaction.

And it's in Paris, France, a city I love, I spent three years as a doctoral student there. What do I see? But this gross mockery of the Last Supper? So I ran a headline in the shovel saying, paraphrasing here, but basically that the Paras Olympia organisers have apologised, they're going to make sure that they get it right for the closing ceremony, they're going to depict the Catholic Church correctly with a beautiful scene depicting the systematic cover-up of child abuse, right? Which is quite a provocative headline.

And so even though I know that obviously there's a hell of a lot of history of, child abuse in the Catholic Church. I wanted to make sure that that were held true in France, right? Like, this is a criticism of the French Catholic Church. And so I did some research there to make sure that it was true. And, you know, surprise, surprise, horrific levels, like even beyond what I could possibly imagine levels of abuse of children in the French Catholic Church. But, you know, that's an example of where, you know, I do want to make sure that that they're having. headline is backed up by facts. So that, you know, it's a fairly quick fact checking process, but it exists. That sounds a lot like a journalist describing their research process.

Well, certainly what I do, you know, I think it is in some ways a subset of journalism. Yeah, I think because, you know, it's different from, say, just fake news or just making stuff up, which, you know, is not what I do. I mean, yes, the stuff I do is not real news, but it is based on a truth. So James says, yes, this is the kind of journalism. Dom says it behaves like journalism, but he doesn't want the label. And then there's Alice Frazier, stand-up comic and host of the satirical podcast, The Goggle and The Last Post, as well as a frequent contributor to The Bugle.

objectivity is a myth, but even scientists, the cleanest, purest, science-y scientists just doing the molecular weight of numbers or some shit that is completely stripped of any political thing, they are driven by their urges, their upbringing, their interest. What are you interested in but the thing that makes your heart flutter, you know, that this myth of objectivity, what you're interested in, what you're paying attention to is, says something about your character. What you see and what you note about what you see is who you are. You're news journalist, you'll interview this person and that person, but you'll interview the person you think is important. You might not interview the janitor, or you might interview the janitor and not the CEO.

Any of those selections will say something about your character and they will not be objective decisions and nor should they be. So for Alice, the difference isn't journalist or not, it's how honest you are about the fact that you can't be neutral. You always bring your own eyes, your own heart, your own weird obsession with 1990s X-Men comic book lore to the story. Dan Illich hosts the climate-anxious politics roasting podcast, a rational feel. As a result of kind of pulling together an audience and having an audience attached to you

and the business model of making comedy in 2024 is preaching to the choir because you can build an audience of people that agree with you and then they give you money to continue to do that. So we're kind of thinking about, you know, kind of people we're making jokes of. We are making jokes. It's important to kind of make jokes of both sides. Sometimes it's harder. Like I mentioned, like with the business model the way it is currently, it's like the audience is attached to you.

And if you build a progressive audience, they'll be upset that you make jokes about. progressive people. Dan's talking about risk in two directions. The risk of being wrong about the facts and the risk of being too right of centre politically for the people who already love you. I don't really have an agenda. Andy Zaltzman again. So we generally try and pick up on the biggest stories globally. I try to make sure that it's not got too much of a UK focus. I think that's always been one of the things people have liked about it, that it has been more global. See, sometimes there's just big stories that are, you know, the main things in the news agenda. Others might sort of dig around to find something that maybe hasn't had so much attention.

There's a strong element in sort of topical comedy that it's almost its main purpose is a sort of catharsis for the listener that, you know, you're not trying to change the world through a podcast with a, not particularly massive listenership, but you're giving people a, you know, a bit of relief in talking about news stories in a manner that hopefully brings a bit of light into what can otherwise seem fairly unremittingly dark. So Dom Knight wants you to understand the logic. James Clofield checks the facts like a court reporter with a punchline.

Alice Fasier says objectivity is a beautiful, lie you should still wrestle with. Dan Illich is worried about being bulletproof for a paying audience, and Andy Zoltzman adds this, satire as a pressure valve for a world that's permanently on fire. Which brings us to the awkward part. If people are getting the news from these shows, what is that due to ideas like truth, balance and objectivity?