abstract

mainstream media

status : unfinished

Research indicates that the reach of fake news websites is limited to small parts of the population. On the other hand, data demonstrate that large proportions of the public know about notable fake news stories and believe them. These findings imply the possibility that most people hear about fake news stories not from fake news websites but through their coverage in mainstream news outlets. Thus far, only limited attention has been directed to the role of mainstream media in the dissemination of disinformation. To remedy this, this article synthesizes the literature pertaining to understand the role mainstream media play in the dissemination of fake news, the reasons for such coverage and its influences on the audience.

While political actors have probably always exaggerated, misled or at times even lied, it seems both the frequency of lies and their centrality in the strategy of some political actors have increased in recent years. Politicians’ opportunities to disseminate disinformation directly to the public, bypassing the media's gatekeeping and their editorial scrutiny, have increased with the rise of social media and the possibilities they afford and with a weakening of what Graves and Wells (2019, p. 42) call ‘factual accountability.’ Another cause of disinformation lies with the rise of ‘the fake news genre’ (Egelhofer & Lecheler, 2019), referring to the intentional spread of false information, masked as traditional news, to advance political goals or generate ad revenues (Bennett & Livingston, 2018; Guess et al., 2019; Pickard, 2016). Two well-known examples are a complex of fake news websites run by teenagers from a small town in Macedonia and a U.S. company called Disinfomedia, owning many sites disguised as serious journalism (including USAToday.com.co and WashingtonPost.com.co). Both operations spread pro-Trump and anti-Clinton fake news stories prior to the 2016 U.S. elections (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017, p. 217), as did many so-called alternative news websites in the right-wing media ecosystem (Benkler et al., 2018). As opposed to disinformation by political actors, a main characteristic of the fake news genre is that the original producers of the information are harder to trace given that they purposively hide their true identity when presenting the information as originating from a legitimate news outlet. The phenomenon is not restricted to the U.S.: similar phenomena can be found across the world, ranging from Latin America (Tedeneke, 2018) to Israel (Pfeffer, 2019), France (Farand, 2017) and Indonesia (Lamb, 2019).

While disinformation has circulated through media since the early days of mass communication, scholars and pundits have argued that recent years mark ‘the rise of the misinformation society’ (Pickard, 2016, p. 119) and the era of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘post truth’ (Benkler et al., 2018; Madrigal, 2017). As Higgins (2016, p. 9) explains, the term ‘post-truth’ describes not only an increase in the frequency of lies in the public sphere, but refers to a world in which truth is no longer an expectation. The rise in use of disinformation (defined as the intentional and purposive spread of misleading information, which is different from misinformation which relates to ‘unintentional behaviors that inadvertently mislead’; Chadwick & Vaccari, 2019, p. 14; see also Benkler et al., 2018, p. 24) spans across the globe from Europe and the U.S. to Brazil, Nepal, and Russia (to name a few examples) and across contexts from health issues (such as the safety of the childhood vaccinations) through environmental problems (such as global warming) to consumer topics (such as the effects of Listerine mouthwash on the severity of colds) and, of course, to diverse political and social debates.

While the phenomena of political actors actively spreading misleading information are well-known and discussed, the role of traditional news media, who are supposed to be the bearers of truth and factual accuracy, is less well understood. In this article, we argue that traditional news media are in fact a part of the problem, and play a somewhat paradoxical role with respect to fake news and its dissemination. On the one hand, the journalistic community's reaction to the rise of disinformation seems to be a renewed emphasis on truth and facts, with some journalistic brands around the world being more careful with facts than ever (Glasser, 2016). This response is reflected in a sharp proliferation of fact-checking (Graves, 2016), which has increased by more than 900% since 2001 in newspapers and by more than 2,000% in broadcast media (Amazeen, 2013). On the other hand, in order to correct disinformation, news media have to repeat it and repeating lies often makes it more difficult to correct them (Lewandowsky et al., 2012). In addition, few other institutions have the reach of news media (Waisbord, 2018). Research also indicates that the reach of fake news sites (Fletcher et al., 2018) and the consumption of fake news stories online (Grinberg et al., 2019; Guess et al., 2019) are limited to quite small parts of the population. Taken together, this implies that many people may hear about fake news stories through mainstream news media. Thus, the paradoxical situation arises that mainstream media covering disinformation help in its dissemination – even though their purpose is to correct disinformation.