“Do you realize what you have done @svtnyheter – public service?” The SKOLKO scandal as media mixing

In 2018, the satirical public service prime time programme ‘Svenska Nyheter’ (Swedish News, SVT, 2018-) sparked a serious and multifaceted debate in Swedish press and comments sections, after launching the web tool ‘SKOLKO’ (translates into ‘SCHOOL QUE’ but also connotes the word ‘skolka’, meaning ‘to cutting class’). The tool was designed to make fun of but also correct an unfair allocations system for private school applications. While there has been quite a few studies of the textual qualities of satirical calls to action (cf. Baym 2005; Day 2011; Jones 2013), there has been less focus the mapping of how satirical modes of discourse blend with non-satirical ones, in the context of public and civic debate – especially in relation to public service satire. Using the case of SKOLKO, and considering the ensuing debate as rhetorical and performative acts, we ask how various media, modes of discourse, and stakeholders interplay, in order to map the processual development of the discursive and political meaning of the event. The study is interdisciplinary, combining methods from rhetoric and media and communication studies; and the analysis is approached from the perspective of dialogism (Todorov 1984), focussing especially on the polyphonic, emotional, contextual and intertextual dimensions of utterance-response. The empirical materials consist of the programme itself, news and debate articles, as well as a social media analysis of the programme’s comments section. The analysis shows how the contextualization of issues is a primary point of controversy, and how strategies of discursive positioning can expand the public debate and reach of an issue, by appealing to non-aligned discursive communities. This in turn demonstrates how the processual development of a public issue emerges in the mix of constitutive rhetorical, satirical, cultural and social practices across a range of media