With the rise of populist politics, “fake news” has become a political concept used to undermine trust in journalists, journalism and news. Discuss using relevant examples.
In an era of post-truth politics, nationalist populism has gained traction globally. From Brazil to the United Kingdom, populist leaders have taken power after mobilising disenchanted voters via social media against the ‘political establishment’.
The electoral success of these populist leaders or strongmen is “predicated upon an antagonistic relationship between ‘the political establishment’ which include mainstream news media) and ‘the people’ (the audience)” (Hanitzsch, van Dalen, & Steindl, 2018).
And the rise of authoritarian populism ( Dunham, 2017) has also been attributed to various other factors such as the growth of anti-elitism, a post-truth political climate, giant technology companies and their impact in society, the ubiquity of social media and fake news websites as well as false balance in news reporting (Gopalakrishna, 2016; Dunt, 2016).
Post-truth politics and fake news are two potent weapons in the arsenal of populists particularly right-wing politicians. These potent weapons are being in the disinformation war against political opponents and journalists through social networks and social messaging platforms. Trolling, hoaxes, smear campaigns, hate mails, death threats, hacking are some of the tools used by populists to cow or silence journalists and news organisations they don’t like. For the purpose of this paper, it is worth defining the terms “post-truth” and “fake news”.
Post-truth (also called post-truth politics and post-factual politics) has been defined as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (Oxford Dictionary).
“Fake news” on the other hand has been defined in a recent study as “news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017, 213).
The tumultuous political climate engendered by nationalist populism has brought significant challenges to journalists, journalism and the way news is reported. Disinformation and misinformation campaigns from political actors have polarised society and threatened the work of journalists as purveyors of information and the truth. Populist leaders in many countries around the world have launched efforts to undermine and delegitimise the mainstream news media (Dunham, 2017).
These populist leaders have enacted stringent laws and tighten regulations in the guise of fighting ‘fake news’ for political and ideological ends. Journalists are being scapegoated for the problems of ‘fake news’ and are becoming collateral damage in the so-called war on disinformation. Many journalists have become target for these populist leaders and their supporters as they seek to silence them. In 2016, press freedom worldwide deteriorated to its lowest point in 13 years due to the unprecedented threats to journalists and media organisations (Dunham, 2017).
It is worth noting that 2016 was the year “post-truth” was chosen as Oxford Dictionaries’ “Word of the Year”. In the same year the Australian equivalent of the Oxford Dictionaries, the Macquarie Dictionary chose “fake news” as its “Word of the Year”. These words came to global prominence in the context of that year’s EU Referendum in the United Kingdom and the ‘toxic’ media coverage of the U.S presidential election.
The fulcrum of nationalist populism is identity politics which have been used by populist politicians “to shore up support for their political projects by emphasising the negative effects of diversity, blaming immigrants and ethnic minority groups (and ‘the elites’ that supports them) for a variety of social problems” (Poole, 2016). ‘The elites’ in the above statement is a pejorative term for liberals, left-leaning journalists and media organisations.
The populists have largely done this “othering of minority groups” with the tacit support of right-leaning mainstream media and conservative news platforms that have put these negative issues at the forefront of their news agenda. In other words, the media have been “seen to play a vital role in both facilitating and resisting populist movements” (Kavada, 2018).
In Harb (2011) it was shown “how propaganda has changed to mean mass suggestion or influence through the manipulation of symbols and the psychology of the individual”.
Social media is the theatre where these dark forces threatening the safety and survival of journalists stage and execute their disinformation and propaganda campaigns. The social networking platforms have become in what the Oxford Internet Institute called “fertile ground for computational propaganda”. The social networks and social messaging platforms amplify disinformation and fake news peddled by political actors.
Social media is the populists propaganda conduit for disinformation and has been demonstrated on numerous occasions propaganda is effective in the dissemination of “biased ideas and opinions, often through the use of lies and deceptions” (Harb 2011: 7). Cambridge Analytica and Bell Pottinger used the social media to wage successful disinformation and propaganda campaigns against journalists and other opponents at the behest of powerful political actors
As stated above fake news has been weaponised to discredit and undermine trust in journalists, media organisations and news. The current president of the United States, Donald Trump, is one of the well-known populist leaders that have used the ‘fake news’ slur to undermine journalists, media organisations and news. Trump’s war on the media, which plays out on his twitter account and political rallies is aimed at muddying the political discourse. Trump peddled in misinformation and disinformation that are intended to discredit the mainstream news media for what he called “their “bias and fake news reporting”.
President Trump tweeted last year: “Our real opponent is not the Democrats, or the dwindling number of Republicans that lost their way and got left behind, our primary opponent is the Fake News Media. In the history of our Country they have never been so bad!” (Trump, Sept 2019, Twitter).
Two prominent mainstream media organisations that have incurred the wrath of Trump’s war on the media are Cable News Network (CNN) and the New York Times. He branded the former a “fake news outlet” and the latter “a failing business”.
CNN’s White House reporter Jim Acosta was humiliated by President Trump during a press conference at the White House in 2018 after he took offence to Acosta’s questioning about his claims of migrant “caravans” from central America (The Guardian, 2018).
Acosta’s White House press accreditation was revoked after the verbal altercation with President Trump. The revocation was reversed after CNN sued the White House for using “a doctored video” of the altercation to bar Acosta.
In his memoir Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America (2018) Acosta discussed at length how President Trump attempted to undermine his work with a disinformation campaign on Twitter and called him “a liar” at his rallies. Acosta also revealed the numerous death threats he received from Trump’s supporters and the round-the-clock protection the FBI had provided him.
The threat to American journalists’ safety as a result of Trump’s rhetoric became apparent in 2018 when pipe bombs were mailed to CNN’s office in New York by a Trump supporter, Cesar Sayoc Jr (Independent, 2018).
David Smith, a journalist with The Guardian Newspaper in a 2019 piece, wrote that: “Trump’s ‘fake news’ and the ‘enemy of the people’ slogans are intended to sow distrust in media outlets and delegitimise journalists, reporting and even facts themselves” (The Guardian, 2019).
This unconventional tactic of President Trump had served him well politically and was instrumental in him winning the 2016 presidential election against the strong favourite Hilary Clinton. In fact, several political commentators have suggested that Trump would not have won the 2016 presidential election were it not for the influence of fake news (Parkinson 2016; Read 2016; Dewey 2016).
Fake news that favoured Trump were widely shared on social media, about 30 million times on Facebook alone ((Allcott and Gentzkow 2017).
Trump and his aides have shown little or no respect for fact or the truth. Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration attendance figures were disputed by the media after he boasted of pulling more crowds than his predecessor, Barack Obama. Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House aide put out what she called “alternative facts” during a press interview with NBC’s Meet The Press to challenge “the deliberately false reporting” by the mainstream media on Trump’s inauguration (The Guardian 2017).
In a similar vein, Rudy Giulliani, Trump’s personal lawyer uttered the phrase “Truth isn’t truth” during another interview with NBC. Giulliani was attempting to discredit media reports that the White House was delaying in granting the special counsel Robert Mueller an access to interview the president on the Russia interference investigation (The Guardian 2018).
However, Trump’s attacks on mainstream media have stirred a national debate in the US about its implications for the safety of journalists and democracy. Trump’s war on the media is being repeated in several other countries with populist leaders such as Brazil, Philippines, Turkey, Hungary, Russia to name a few.
Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil nicknamed Trump of the Tropics, a populist leader with a strong affection for military dictatorship, won the presidency on an anti-media campaign. Bolsonaro has deployed a Trump-like tactics by declaring a war on the independent media in Brazil. Shortly after his win, he dismissed investigative reporting as “fake news” invented by a “corrupt establishment”. His supporters have threatened journalists and created a culture of fear across newsrooms in Brazil (Reuters, 2018).
The threat is intense online were trolls can anonymously target journalists and media organisations with smear campaigns. Female journalists are disproportionately targeted for online trolling and hate campaign as demonstrated in a study by Demos, a British think tank. In the study which examined thousands of tweets, the think tank found that “journalism was the only category where women received more abuse than men, with female journalists and TV news presenters receiving roughly three times as much abuse as their male counterparts” (Bartlett 2014).
The modus operandi of these trolls targeting female journalists is the use of lies about their character, humiliation, threat of sexual assault or rape to silence them. The study also highlighted the key words the trolls used such as “slut”, “whore”, “rape”, “ugly” which are deliberately chosen to cause hurt and emotional distress to their victims.
“There are days when I wake up to verbal violence and fall asleep with sexist and racist rage echoing in my ears. It’s like a low-intense, constant warfare”, Swedish investigative journalist Alexandra Pascalidou recounted her online trolling experience before a European Commission session in Brussels in 2016.
Similar sentiments were expressed by Finnish investigative journalist Jessikka Aro who was also targeted by trolls. Her personal data was breach and contact address shared online. She was also subjected to psychological torture and death threats.
“I received a phone call in which someone fired a gun. Later, someone texted me, claiming to be my dead father and told me he was ‘observing’ me,” Aro told Sage Journals (Sage, 2016).
In Philippines Maria Ressa, a female journalist and former CNN war correspondent who now works with the independent media Rappler, was a target of an online disinformation campaign with strong links to the Duterte regime.
“It began a spiral of silence. Anyone who was critical or asked questions about extrajudicial killings was attacked, brutally attacked. The women got it worst. And we’ve realised that the system is set up to silence dissent – designed to make journalists docile. We’re not supposed to be asking hard questions, and we’re certainly not supposed to be critical,” Ressa says (Posetti, 2017).
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