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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.
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Cited by (10)
Cited by ten other publications
Farkas, Johan & Sabina Schousboe
2024. Facts, values, and the epistemic authority of journalism: How journalists use and define the terms fake news, junk news, misinformation, and disinformation. Nordicom Review 45:1 ► pp. 137 ff.
Hasell, Ariel & Audrey Halversen
2024. Feeling Misinformed? The Role of Perceived Difficulty in Evaluating Information Online in News Avoidance and News Fatigue. Journalism Studies► pp. 1 ff.
2024. Multifaceted online coordinated behavior in the 2020 US presidential election. EPJ Data Science 13:1
Diez-Gracia, Alba, Pilar Sánchez-García & Javier Martín-Román
2023. Disintermediation and disinformation as a political strategy: use of AI to analyse fake news as Trump’s rhetorical resource on Twitter. El Profesional de la información
Farkas, Johan
2023. News on fake news. Journal of Language and Politics 22:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Farkas, Johan
2023. Fake News in Metajournalistic Discourse. Journalism Studies 24:4 ► pp. 423 ff.
Galande, Ashish S., Frank Mathmann, Cesar Ariza-Rojas, Benno Torgler & Janina Garbas
2023. You are lying! How misinformation accusations spread on Twitter. Internet Research 33:5 ► pp. 1907 ff.
Nikolaev, Alexander G.
2022. A Russian-American News Cross-Coverage. A Hidden Threat to the Democratic Way of Life. Southern Communication Journal 87:3 ► pp. 277 ff.
Benaissa Pedriza, Samia
2021. Sources, Channels and Strategies of Disinformation in the 2020 US Election: Social Networks, Traditional Media and Political Candidates. Journalism and Media 2:4 ► pp. 605 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.