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Article published In:
Discourses of Fake News
Edited by Scott Wright
[Journal of Language and Politics 20:5] 2021
► pp. 761–782

Audience constructions of fake news in Australian media representations of asylum seekers

A critical discourse perspective

ORCID logo | The University of Melbourne

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.

Keywords: fake news, media, audiences, critical discourse analysis, Australia, asylum seekers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Trust and mistrust in the era of ‘fake news’
  • 3.Conceptualising ‘fake news’
  • 4.The ‘fake news’ audience
  • 5.Research design
    • 5.1Participants, sampling and data collection
    • 5.2Analysis
    • 5.3Theoretical framework: The fake news ‘genre’ versus fake news ‘label’
  • 6.Findings and discussion
    • 6.1News engagement and trust
    • 6.2‘Force-fed garbage’: Discussions of fake news as a genre
    • 6.3‘Leftist propaganda’: Deploying the fake news label
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Declaration of interest statement
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.21028.haw
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