Some More News

The bit is: Cody Johnston is a news anchor who hates his job, hates the format, hates the medium, and nonetheless does it with exceptional rigour. The bit is also the analysis. That’s the trick.

Most political satire on YouTube operates in one of two modes. Mode A is the Daily Show model: comedy with politics as the material, the laugh track as the editorial verdict, the joke as a substitute for a conclusion. Mode B is the video essay model: politics with a comedic veneer that’s primarily stylistic and doesn’t survive contact with difficult subject matter. Some More News operates in a third mode that very few channels have found: it uses the satirical frame to reveal rather than to deflect. When Johnston complains that the segment is too long, that he has too many graphs to cover, that the advertising needs to be read in the middle of a sentence about housing unaffordability — the complaint is the point. The medium is being used to critique the medium.

The analytical depth is genuinely impressive. Episodes on housing policy, on the mechanics of gerrymandering, on the structural incentives of the pharmaceutical industry are rigorously sourced, carefully constructed, and would hold up as straight journalism if you removed the running gag of a miserable anchor who can’t believe he has to cover this again. The joke never comes at the expense of the information. This is the discipline that most political comedy channels don’t have.

Johnston has found the one honest thing about political news presentation: that doing it well is demoralising. He has built an entire channel on that honest thing.

Consistency is the main concern. Upload frequency is erratic — months can pass between major episodes, and the channel’s Substack presence and podcast suggest that Johnston’s creative energy disperses across formats. When Some More News posts, it’s usually worth the wait. The problem is that “usually worth the wait” is not a sustainable editorial proposition, and the channel’s fanbase has developed the slightly feverish quality of an audience that has waited too long for something they care about.

The X-Factor ceiling is also lower than first impressions suggest. The meta-commentary frame is brilliant, but it is a frame — and once you’ve fully understood the joke, subsequent episodes are slightly less surprising. Johnston needs an evolution that deepens the format without abandoning its distinctive self-awareness. That evolution is visible in some episodes and absent in others. When it lands, Some More News is the sharpest political channel on the platform. When it treads water, it’s an extremely well-produced version of a format that has already peaked.

The score of 79 — sitting at the very top of GOOD, knocking on EXCELLENT’s door — reflects exactly that tension. The content quality and replay value are there. The consistency score (54, the lowest number we’ve put next to anything this analytically capable) drags the overall down because it has to: a channel you can’t rely on to show up is a channel with a structural problem, regardless of how good the episodes are when they arrive. Johnston has the material. He needs to find the cadence.

Some More News entered the Top 50 at #50 in Issue #011 — the political influx issue — and its ranking will move when the uploads do. The ceiling here is EXCELLENT. The floor, if the dispersal across Substack and podcast continues, is a channel that slowly fades from relevance while its archive remains one of the most rewatchable things in the political comedy genre. Johnston deserves better than that. So do his viewers.