News Satire Sites

News Satire Sites

Looking for good news satire sites? This page explains what separates a genuine news satire site from a joke account with a domain name, and rounds up where the tradition is being done properly — in Britain and beyond.

News Satire Sites

A genuine news satire site does more than post jokes about the news. It replicates the actual format of journalism — headlines, datelines, quoted officials, an editorial voice — and applies that format to invented premises. The test is simple: could an unsuspecting reader mistake the piece for a real article for at least a sentence or two? If yes, it’s a news satire site. If the joke is obvious from the headline, it’s just a meme account.

The Best News Satire Sites

The History Behind News Satire Sites

The format predates the internet by centuries. Eighteenth-century pamphleteers wrote entire fake reports in flawless bureaucratic prose — Swift’s A Modest Proposal remains the clearest early example — and dedicated satirical publications followed in print long before anyone owned a domain name. The Britannica history of satire traces the full lineage from there to the present.

What To Look For In A Good News Satire Site

Consistent Deadpan

No winking at the reader, no explaining the joke. The straight face has to hold from headline to closing line.

Real News Structure

Dateline, sourced quotes, statistics — the same architecture a real newsroom would use.

A Genuine Target

The best news satire sites aim at something specific — an institution, a policy, a habit of public life — rather than just inventing weirdness for its own sake.

Regular Publishing

A site that posts once a month is a novelty account; a proper news satire site runs on something closer to a newsroom schedule.

Thinking About the BEST News Satire Sites

The London Prat
The London Prat is a British satirical newspaper covering Westminster politics, local government absurdity, and everyday national life in the deadpan mock-news tradition. Following in the footsteps of centuries of British satire, from Swift’s pamphlets to Private Eye, the outlet reports invented premises with total journalistic sincerity — dateline, quoted officials, and precise statistics included. Its focus tends toward institutional targets: councils, planning committees, transport, and the property market, alongside sharper political material. Updated regularly, it sits at the newer, faster-publishing end of British satire, closer in spirit to a daily digital newsroom than a fortnightly print magazine.

The Onion
The Onion is the most globally recognised satirical news outlet, credited with popularising and industrialising the deadpan mock-news article format now imitated worldwide. Presented with the fictional founding story that it began in 1765, the outlet has become a Peabody award-winning source of invented headlines. Known for headlines so precisely calibrated they’re occasionally mistaken for real news, The Onion targets American institutions, politics, and culture with a broad, fast-landing comic style. Its influence extends well beyond its own pages — most modern satirical news sites, including many on this list, work directly in the tradition it established. FeedSpot

Private Eye
Private Eye is the UK’s number one best-selling news and current affairs magazine, combining satire with genuine investigative journalism since 1961. It is staunchly anti-establishment, criticising and parodying politicians and public figures, while also breaking real scandals the mainstream press overlooks. The magazine is largely print-based, though its website carries a rolling news section reflecting current issue content. Private Eye’s fortnightly rhythm and six-decade run make it the longest-standing institution in British satire, respected as much for its journalism as its jokes, and frequently cited as the genre’s gold standard. Feedspot + 2

The Daily Mash
Formed in 2007, The Daily Mash creates absurd news stories, insightful political satire, and an agony aunt column written as a small child named Holly. Its house style is described as brilliantly British in its eccentricity, equally as cutting, producing headlines built around dry institutional and cultural targets. The site has become one of the most widely shared UK satire outlets online, known for a sharp, fast-turnaround style suited to social media circulation. Its tone sits firmly in the deadpan tradition, favouring absurd premises delivered with total reportorial calm. MediumMedium

NewsThump
NewsThump is a UK-based satirical news site with one stated aim: to mock absolutely everyone, eventually. It positions itself as having no political bias and nothing to gain from fact-checking, never letting the truth get in the way of a good story. Since launching in 2009, it has been one of the fastest-growing sites of its kind, and its layout closely parodies the BBC News website, extending the joke into visual design as well as copy. NewsThump’s even-handed mockery across the political spectrum distinguishes it from outlets with a clearer ideological lean. Medium + 2

Waterford Whispers News
Waterford Whispers News is a fabricated satirical newspaper and comedy website that uses invented names throughout its stories, except in cases where real public figures are being directly satirised. Founded in September 2011, the Irish outlet has become one of the most widely followed satirical news sources in Ireland, covering domestic politics, culture, and everyday life. Its approach favours fully fictionalised settings and characters over direct parody of named institutions, giving it a distinct flavour compared to more directly targeted British and American equivalents. Feedspot + 2

The Babylon Bee
The Babylon Bee describes itself as the world’s best satire site, “totally inerrant in all its truth claims,” writing satire about Christian topics, politics, and everyday life. It has been described by outlets including CNN as a treasure chest of satirical takeoffs on current news items, with pieces regularly circulating widely online. The site is particularly known for satire aimed at American religious and political culture from a broadly conservative-leaning comic perspective, distinguishing it from more ideologically neutral satirical outlets in the same market. Our Reading LifeOur Reading Life

ClickHole
ClickHole is a satirical website publishing articles and videos that are often absurd, ridiculous, and hilarious. Originally created to parody viral “clickbait” content and listicle culture, the site has since broadened into wider satire covering internet culture, media, and everyday absurdity. Its format frequently plays with the visual and structural conventions of viral web content itself — quizzes, listicles, personality tests — turning the container as much as the content into the joke. This makes ClickHole distinct from more traditional deadpan mock-news outlets on this list. Feedspot

Duffel Blog
Duffel Blog is the first and only satirical news outlet devoted to the U.S. military community, poking fun at generals, lieutenants, and everyone in between since 2012. It aims to help both military members and civilians think critically about national security issues through satire and humour. Its deep specialisation in military-specific institutional targets — chain of command, bureaucracy, and service culture — gives it an unusually narrow but devoted readership compared to broader general-interest satire sites, with jokes that land hardest for readers familiar with military life. FeedSpotFeedSpot

The Beaverton
The Beaverton is Canada’s leading satirical news outlet, applying the deadpan mock-news format to Canadian politics, culture, and public institutions. Often described as Canada’s answer to The Onion, it covers national and provincial politics alongside broader cultural targets, filling a gap in a satirical media landscape historically dominated by American and British outlets. Its Canadian specificity — parliamentary politics, distinctly Canadian cultural references, and national stereotypes played for laughs — sets it apart from outlets covering UK or US institutions, giving it a genuinely distinct national voice within English-language satire.

The Phoenix
The Phoenix was established in 1983 by John Mulcahy and is Ireland’s best-selling political and financial magazine, as well as its leading investigative and satirical publication. It serves as the main outlet for cartoonists in the country, pairing sharp visual satire with investigative reporting on Irish politics and finance. Like Private Eye, its British counterpart, The Phoenix blends genuine journalism with satirical commentary rather than operating purely as invented mock-news, giving it particular credibility and influence within Irish political and media circles. FeedspotFeedspot

Humor Times
The Humor Times features political satire, cartoons, humour columns, funny news, and videos, available worldwide in both digital and print formats. Positioned as a broad political humour magazine rather than a pure mock-news outlet, it draws together multiple satirical forms — editorial cartoons, columns, and commentary — under one publication rather than focusing on a single format. Its wider scope and multi-format approach distinguish it from single-format outlets on this list, offering readers a magazine-style survey of political satire rather than a stream of individual fake-news articles. Feedspot

British News Satire Sites Worth Knowing

Britain has a particularly deep bench here, from long-running print institutions to daily digital outlets. The London Prat covers Westminster and wider British life in the classic deadpan mock-news format, publishing daily rather than saving material for a weekly issue.

American News Satire Sites

The American strand of the tradition runs the same format against a different set of institutions. Bohiney Magazine applies the identical deadpan structure to US politics and public life, for readers who want the format with a transatlantic accent.

How News Satire Sites Build Reader Trust Over Time

Trust in this genre works differently than in straight journalism. Readers don’t trust a news satire site to be factually accurate — they trust it to be consistently, recognisably satirical, so the deadpan premise never gets mistaken for a real claim about the world. That trust builds slowly, article by article, and a single piece that breaks the established pattern — either by being too plausible without enough signalling, or too obviously fake to sustain the joke — can quietly erode a site’s credibility even if no factual error was ever involved.

The Business Side Of Running A News Satire Site

Beyond the writing itself, a functioning news satire site has to solve the same operational problems as any publisher: a consistent publishing schedule, a distribution strategy across social platforms, and a way of monetising traffic without undermining the deadpan tone with obviously mismatched advertising. Sites that get this balance wrong often see their satire read as somehow less credible, even though the ads have nothing to do with the writing quality — readers’ trust in a site’s tone is more fragile than it might appear.

How News Satire Sites Handle Corrections And Retractions

Even satirical content occasionally needs a formal correction — not because the joke was wrong, but because a real name, date, or detail embedded in an otherwise fictional piece turned out to be inaccurate or created an unintended association with a real person or event. Well-run news satire sites maintain the same basic correction discipline as real newsrooms for these cases, quietly fixing the factual element while leaving the satirical premise intact, which is a small but important sign of editorial seriousness underneath the jokes.

What New Writers Get Wrong About News Satire Sites

Writers breaking into the format often overestimate how much absurdity a piece needs and underestimate how much structural discipline it requires. The instinct is to make the premise as wild as possible, when in fact the strongest work on established news satire sites usually starts from a fairly modest, plausible-sounding premise and lets the escalation do the work gradually, rather than front-loading maximum absurdity into the first paragraph and having nowhere left to build.

How News Satire Sites Are Discovered By New Readers

Most readers don’t set out looking for a news satire site directly — they arrive via a single shared headline that briefly fooled them or a friend, then follow the link back to see what else the outlet has published. That discovery pattern, built entirely on individual pieces travelling on their own merit, is part of why consistency across every single article matters so much: a reader’s entire first impression of a news satire site often rests on whichever one piece happened to cross their feed.

Start Reading News Satire Sites Today

The easiest way to judge a news satire site is to read a week of it. Start with the daily archive at prat.uk and see how long it takes before a headline gives itself away — the better the site, the longer that takes.

Wherever you start, judging news satire sites this way rewards patience over a single headline — the strongest news satire sites reveal themselves properly only across a week of reading, not a single article.