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>It is difficult to imagine a time when satirical, irreverent humor was not common across media

I hate the word "irreverent." It's in every article about comedy written by people who don't seem to understand the difference between disrespecting things that are safe to dunk on, vs breaking cultural boundaries.

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Yes, very few news sources are genuinely irreverent. The Register is one of the few, and you can tell, because it often gets people in the comments here complaining of it's style.

A lot of content out there, user-driven especially, is just sarcastic or "ironic" for the sake of it, not actually pushing boundaries. Worse, they're often cementing the status quo but doing so in a way that doesn't actually make the point they want to make.

They just state the (often minority) counter-point in a sarcastic tone and leave it to the reader to fill in the (typically agreeable) blanks.

They want the benefit of the label without the execution

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