The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories (“fake news”), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the election. Drawing on web browsing data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new online survey, we find: (i) social media was an important but not dominant source of election news, with 14 percent of Americans calling social media their “most important” source; (ii) of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared 8 million times; (iii) the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them; and (iv) people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks.

/pdf/social-media-and-fake-news-in-the-2016-election-1m4ttkb5mo.pdf

Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election

The theory of affordances

After virtue, a study in moral theory

Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time

This study examines news consumption patterns of college students by asking where respondents get breaking news and where this source leads them next. The findings, based on an online survey, show ...

Most students get breaking news first from Twitter

‘Fake news’ has been a topic of controversy during and following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Much of the scholarship on it to date has focused on the ‘fakeness’ of fake news, illuminating the kinds of deception involved and the motivations of those who deceive. This study looks at the ‘newsness’ of fake news by examining the extent to which it imitates the characteristics and conventions of traditional journalism. Through a content analysis of 886 fake news articles, we find that in terms of news values, topic, and formats, articles published by fake news sites look very much like traditional—and real—news. Most of their articles included the news values of timeliness, negativity, and prominence; were about government and politics; and were written in an inverted pyramid format. However, one point of departure is in terms of objectivity, operationalized as the absence of the author’s personal opinion. The analysis found that the majority of articles analyzed included the opinion of their author or authors.

/pdf/what-is-fake-news-analyzing-news-values-and-more-in-fake-5cl2ksxa3v.pdf

What is (fake) news? Analyzing news values (and more) in fake stories

This study focused on the phenomenology of covering a natural disaster by documenting the lived experience of 12 national and local journalists who covered Typhoon Haiyan when it hit the Philippine...

Journalists are humans, too: A phenomenology of covering the strongest storm on earth

The affordance effect: Gatekeeping and (non)reciprocal journalism on Twitter

The increasing influence of actors who might not fit into traditional definitions of a journalist but are taking part in processes that produce journalism has attracted scholarly attention. They have been called interlopers, strangers, new entrants, peripheral, and emergent actors, among others. As journalism scholars grapple with how to refer to these actors, it is important to reflect on the assumptions that underlie emerging labels. These include: 1) what journalistic tasks are involved; 2) how and why these journalistic tasks are performed; 3) who is making the definition; and 4) where and when these actors are located. However, journalism being the centre of our investigation should not automatically assume that it is at the centre of social life. So, it might also be that for the technological field, journalism is at the periphery; that for these technology-oriented actors whose influence across fields is increasing, journalists and what they do are at the periphery. For a field that supposedly plays an important role in public life, this has important implications.

/pdf/journalism-at-the-periphery-4vs3hhhpf6.pdf

Edson C. Tandoc

Papers

Most students get breaking news first from Twitter

What is (fake) news? Analyzing news values (and more) in fake stories

Journalists are humans, too: A phenomenology of covering the strongest storm on earth

The affordance effect: Gatekeeping and (non)reciprocal journalism on Twitter

Journalism at the Periphery