Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 20, Issue 5, 2021

A growing literature on the impact of “fake news“ accusations on legacy news outlets suggests that the use of this term is part of a much larger trend of increased and delegitimizing media criticism by political actors. However, so far, there is very little empirical evidence on how prevailing politicians’ delegitimizing media criticism really is and under which conditions it occurs. To fill these gaps, we present results of a content analysis of media-related Facebook postings by Austrian and German politicians in 2017 (N = 2,921). The results suggest that media criticism, in general, is actually rare and that about half of it can be described as delegitimizing (i.e., characterized by incivility or absence of argumentation). Most often, media criticism is used by populist politicians, who accuse “the media” in general of bias and falsehoods.

While the debate around the prevalence and potential effects of fake news has received considerable scholarly attention, less research has focused on how political elites and pundits weaponized fake news to delegitimize the media. In this study, we examine the rhetoric in 2020 U.S. presidential primary candidates Facebook advertisements. Our analysis suggests that Republican and Democratic candidates alike attack and demean the news media on several themes, including castigating them for malicious gatekeeping, for being out of touch with the views of the public, and for being a bully. Only Trump routinely attacks the news media for trafficking in falsehoods and for colluding with other interests to attack his candidacy. Our findings highlight the ways that candidates instrumentalize the news media for their own rhetorical purposes; further constructing the news media as harmful to democracy.

Since the 2016 US federal election, political actors have weaponized online fake news as a means of gaining electoral advantage (Egelhofer and Lecheler 2019). To advance understandings of the actors and methods involved in perpetuating fake news, this article focuses on an Australian story that circulated on and offline through different discourses during the 2019 federal election. We use content analyses of 100,000 media articles and eight million Facebook posts to trace false claims that the centre-left Labor party would introduce an inheritance tax dubbed a ‘death tax’ if it won office. To understand this evolution of ‘death tax’ discourse on and offline – and its weaponization by various actors – we draw from existing theorems of agenda setting, backfire effects, and propose our own recursion theory.

This article longitudinally analyses how Australian politicians engage with, and attack, journalists and the media more generally on Twitter from 2011–2018. The article finds that attacks on journalists have increased significantly since 2016 when Trump came to power, but this is largely the preserve of populist and far-right politicians. These politicians rarely call the media fake, instead alleging bias or questioning the veracity or standards of reporting and production. Many politicians have a functional relationship with the media, rarely criticising the media. Attacks are largely focused on the national public service broadcaster, the ABC, with limited attacks on commercial media.

This article explores the strategic use of ‘fake news’ discourses in non-democratic contexts using a mixed-methods approach grounded in social network analysis and discourse theory. In contexts such as Russia and Iran, where the opposition generally does not have unrestricted access to the political public sphere, social media platforms serve to influence discourses. Given the prevalence of fake news discourses, previous studies have already focused extensively on the political elite and their use of this discourse within Western or Anglo-American contexts, and on the typologies of ‘fake news’. Our findings address this research gap and suggest that ordinary users in non-Western and non-democratic settings do not differentiate between ‘fake news’ types. Rather, they employ the discourse as a means to strategically delegitimise and discredit their opponents.

In recent years, the term ‘fake news’ has gained considerable traction in scholarly and public discourse. While fake news is increasingly attributed to declining audience trust, we know little about how publics are making sense of the concept. To address this, I discuss findings arising from interviews with 24 Western Australian media consumers who offered their perspectives on Australian news coverage of asylum seekers. Combining Critical Discourse methods with Rhetorical Analysis, findings highlight how participants evaluated misinformation and disinformation about asylum seekers and in particular, how some adopted a discourse of ‘fake news’ to delegitimise perspectives that oppose their own stance. Discussed alongside Egelhofer and Lecheler’s (2019) theoretical framework of the fake news ‘label’, I argue that by understanding how audiences discussed fake news before the concept rose to prominence in 2016, scholars can meaningfully examine discursive patterns within social constructions of fake news across numerous contemporary and historical contexts.

This study examines the impact of fake news discourse on perceptions of news media credibility. If participants are told they have been exposed to fake news, does this lead them to trust information institutions less, including the news media? Study 1 (n = 188) found that news media credibility decreased when participants were told they saw fake news, while news credibility did not change when participants were told they saw real news. Study 2 (n = 400) found that those who saw fake news – and were told they saw a fake news post – decreased their trust in the news media while those who saw fake news and were not debriefed did not change their perceptions of the news media. This shows that the social impact of fake news is not limited to its direct consequences of misinforming individuals, but also includes the potentially adverse effects of discussing fake news.

U.S. journalism during the Trump era has experienced numerous legitimacy attacks by the leading political figure. Building on the concepts of institutional legitimacy and intentional trust, this study analyzes legitimation narratives in projections of journalism’s future, using the Harvard University’s NiemanLab Predictions of Journalism from 2017 to 2021. Projectory narratives are meaningful constructions of a field’s future and provide guidance for its actors. The qualitative analysis of a Trump-related subset of predictions (ca. n = 130) convey (1) confrontational narratives of threat, self-reproach, and epistemological authority loss. Confrontational narratives serve to secure consent for suggested transparency and audience relationship building solutions. These (2) solution narratives represent trustification strategies. Lastly, (3) survival narratives aim at regaining authority and agency through legacy mythopoesis and the construction of a cautiously optimistic post-Trump outlook for journalism. Hence, the analysis of projectory narratives reveals how an organizational field collectively prepares for change to regain legitimacy.