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Article published In:
Discourses of Fake News
Edited by Scott Wright
[Journal of Language and Politics 20:5] 2021
► pp. 653–675

Delegitimizing the media?

Analyzing politicians’ media criticism on social media

ORCID logo | University of Vienna
| Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
| University of Vienna

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.

Keywords: media criticism, delegitimization, social media, content analysis, populist communication, fake news
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Media criticism in a digital age: From “good” to “bad”?
  • 3.Characteristics of delegitimizing media criticism
    • 3.1Absence of reasoning
    • 3.2Presence of incivility
  • 4.The importance of the “fake news” label
  • 5.Determinants of delegitimizing media criticism
    • 5.1Political actors: Populist politicians and parties
    • 5.2Journalistic actors: Generalization of addressee
    • 5.3Time period: Election campaigns
  • 6.Methods
    • 6.1Case selection
    • 6.2Sample
    • 6.3Coding procedure
    • 6.4Measures
    • 6.5Intercoder reliability
  • 7.Results
    • 7.1Descriptive results
    • 7.2Delegitimizing media criticism
    • 7.3Determinants of delegitimizing media criticism
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.20081.ege
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