The media and the irony of politically serious situations: consequences of the Muhammed cartoons in Finland

• Published in: Media, Culture & Society
• Main Author: Ridanpää, Juha
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 2012
• Subjects: Northern Finland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443711430754; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0163443711430754; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full-xml/10.1177/0163443711430754

This article discusses the connections between political conflicts and situational irony and their relationship to the media. The focus is on a continuum of ironic events that started from the crisis following the publication of the Muhammed cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which led to a satirical comic strip being published on the web pages of Kaltio, a small cultural journal produced in Oulu, Northern Finland, and ended in the dismissal of the journal’s editor. The empirical discussion concentrates on how the newspaper Kaleva, representing the media, functioned as an active participant in the process of making the incidents surrounding the Kaltio comic strip episode appear ironic, even though the matter was in fact politically highly sensitive. The purpose is to illustrate how and with what intentions political discourses and various textual strategies such as explicit and implicit verbal irony are used. The main argument is that making politically sensitive situations appear ironic is a matter of positioning values, in this case raising the value of freedom of speech above religious norms.