"This book analyzes how digital-native audiovisual satire has become increasingly influential in national public debates within Latin America. Paul Alonso illuminates the role of online video in filling gaps in sociopolitical critique left by television, traditional journalism, and commercial entert ... ainment while exposing some of the prevalent tensions of the region. Alonso draws on interviews and analyzes media content to consider some of the most representative and influential satirical shows born on the internet and produced in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, and Latinx communities in the United States. He discusses YouTubers Chumel Torres, Malena Pichot, Guille Aquino, Joanna Hausmann, and El Cacash; the Enchufe.tv collective; and the video columnists Maria Paulina Baena from La Pulla and Mariángela Urbina from Las Igualadas. These creators use professional and non-mainstream practices and resources to dismantle fake news, highlight social tensions, and offer in-depth content that goes beyond confrontational attacks. In contexts of highly ideological polarization, Alonso argues, digital satire is a unique type of hybrid alternative media that can articulate nonpartisan interpretations of reality while also questioning, deconstructing, and subverting the authoritative role of media. Satiric voices can offer an informed, reflexive, argumentative, or historically rooted perspective that amplifies public discourse and shapes changing notions of journalism and political communication in democratic societies." (Publisher description) more

"En el Perú no ha llegado nuestro Trump, pero nadie se sorprenderá el día que aterrice. Porque aquí también show y política se han contaminado hasta no poder distinguirse. El entrevero es tal que el lector convendrá conmigo en que el premier Aníbal Torres resulta un cómico genuino, al tiemp ... o que el Cacash (Gerardo García), un youtuber de noticias satíricas, asemeja a un ciudadano serio y preocupado por el país. Los políticos dan risa y los comediantes informan. En este libro, Paul Alonso rastrea las hibridaciones entre información y entretenimiento en el Perú de las últimas tres décadas: el infotainment, un fenómeno que, después de todo, se trata de una evolución global que cuenta con exponentes admirables. El problema, en realidad, nos dice Alonso a modo de cierre, es que solo haya lugar para el infotainment. Porque si no diferenciamos entre espectáculo y política, estaremos condenados al interminable espectáculo de la política." (Editorial) more

"Satiric TV in the Americas analyzes some of the most representative and influential satiric TV shows on the continent (focusing on cases in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Chile, and the United States) in order to understand their critical role in challenging the status quo, traditional journalis ... m, and the prevalent local media culture. It illuminates the phenomenon of satire as resistance and negotiation in public discourse, the role of entertainment media as a site where sociopolitical tensions are played out, and the changing notions of journalism in today’s democratic societies. Introducing the notion of “critical metatainment”—a postmodern, carnivalesque result of and a transgressive, self-referential reaction to the process of tabloidization and the cult of celebrity in the media spectacle era—Satiric TV in the Americas is the first book to map, contextualize, and analyze relevant cases to understand the relation between political information, social and cultural dissent, critical humor, and entertainment in the region. Evaluating contemporary satiric media as distinctively postmodern, multilayered, and complex discursive objects that emerge from the collapse of modernity and its arbitrary dichotomies, Satiric TV in the Americas also shows that, as satiric formats travel to a particular national context, they are appropriated in different ways and adapted to local circumstances, thus having distinctive implications." (Publisher description) more

"This article explores how Peruvian sensational and spectacular media served the authoritarian discourse of Alberto Fujimori's government (1990-2000), and how TV infotainment evolved under democracy after 2000. Through interviews with producers and hosts of the TV shows and by reviewing specific epi ... sodes and media events, this article analyses five of the most representative Peruvian infotainment TV shows of the last two decades in Peru. Building upon a theory on media spectacle, infotainment and tabloidisation, this research shows how an increasing process of media hybridity-the blending of journalism, entertainment, politicsand popular culture-has challenged traditional notions of journalism and has become a prevalent strategy of new political communication forms in Peru, connecting with the global trend towards political infotainment in the media." (Abstract) more