The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism

Howard Tumber, Silvio Waisbord, Howard Tumber, Silvio Waisbord

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000346787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing digitale
• Index: Business

This companion brings together a diverse set of concepts used to analyse dimensions of media disinformation and populism globally.

The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism explores how recent transformations in the architecture of public communication and particular attributes of the digital media ecology are conducive to the kind of polarised, anti-rational, post-fact, post-truth communication championed by populism. It is both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, consisting of contributions from both leading and emerging scholars analysing aspects of misinformation, disinformation, and populism across countries, political systems, and media systems. A global, comparative approach to the study of misinformation and populism is important in identifying common elements and characteristics, and these individual chapters cover a wide range of topics and themes, including fake news, mediatisation, propaganda, alternative media, immigration, science, and law-making, to name a few.

This companion is a key resource for academics, researchers, and policymakers as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of political communication, journalism, law, sociology, cultural studies, international politics and international relations.

1
Media, disinformation, and populism

Problems and responses

Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord

Current research and debates in media, disinformation, and populism are issues central to contemporary societies and polities as well as to multidisciplinary research agendas. Media, disinformation, and populism have attracted a great deal of attention in past years. The reasons are self-evident. The digital revolution has upended old media orders, technologies, industries, access, distribution, and uses. New and sophisticated forms of disinformation flooded the global public sphere with falsehood at the same time that populist politics gained citizens’ support worldwide. The global pandemic of COVID-19 has only added to the plethora of misinformation and disinformation bombarding the public with conspiracy theories, falsehoods, and rumours propagating by the day.

As these distortions of public communication are central issues in contemporary societies, they are approached from multiple disciplinary and theoretical positions. We are interested in the way these concepts and related themes are approached by scholars who work at the intersection of journalism studies, media studies, information studies, media sociology, and political communication.

Our goal is not only to provide an overview of fundamental concepts, debates, findings, and arguments but also to foster discussions about the relationships among concepts and phenomena. Various literatures provide valuable insights about the core themes of the scope and consequences of media transformations; the scale, strategies, and effects of disinformation and misinformation; and the causes and the characteristics of populism. Despite the growing literature, lines of inquiry generally run in parallel. Few studies explore how and why media, disinformation, and populism are connected. In this chapter we seek out and discuss points of intersection.

Media

In light of the transformations in communication and political processes, it is important to revisit the conceptual scaffolding used to study media, disinformation, and populism. These concepts have long been the subject of semantic disputes. Technological and social innovations, as well as political developments, therefore make it imperative to reassess their validity and to determine whether new concepts are required to comprehend emergent phenomena.

‘Media’ is a notoriously ambiguous, fluid concept. It was and is commonly used to refer to technologies, industries, and institutions that ‘mediate’ social interaction – that ‘assemble’ (Latour 2005) the social through symbolic exchanges. The digital revolution adds layers of conceptual complexity as it profoundly unsettles media technologies, institutions, and industries. Because contemporary life is mediated like never before in human history, ‘the media’ is a more flexible, dynamic notion.

‘The media’ are not limited to the legacy industries and technologies of the golden era of the mass media and mass society in the past century. If ‘the media’ refers to what ‘mediates’ communication and interaction, then it is self-evident that the types of media are substantially broader than in the past. Among other developments, the proliferation of portable technologies and applications, the encroachment of digital media in social life, and the Internet of things reshuffled the meanings of ‘the media’. ‘The media’ are understood as technologies, processes, and institutions that connect individuals, organisations, and groups in multiple ways in the network society. ‘The media’ are not unitary, homogenous, or centralised.

Conceptual pruning and clarification are essential to map the media industries, media systems, and media content, which are constantly proliferating and evolving.

‘Media industries’ is a concept in flux, due in part to the dilution of traditional boundaries between technology and content companies. Contemporary media industries include hundreds of digital companies, together with the foundational technologies of modern society – newspapers/press, radio, film, television. A diversity of internet companies, including hardware and software companies, populate the ever-expanding media universe. Media industries encompass a larger universe than just the familiar UK’s Fleet Street, the US’s Hollywood, and Silicon Valley and other geographical metonyms.

‘Media systems’ are also more diffused and multi-layered than in the past. The geographical-political boundaries of ‘national’ media systems are destabilising due to unprecedented technological and economic globalisation. New and hybrid actors populate ‘media systems’: state, public, commercial, and ‘public/private’ platforms; civil society; radical, alternative, and open/closed media. There is no single ‘media logic’. Consequently, multiple ‘media logics’ may be a better concept to capture the unique aspects of media platforms and institutions. Similarly, the concept of ‘media content’ includes ever-multiplying forms of expression – from memes to movies, from instant messaging to social media postings. Likewise, ‘mediatisation’ is not simply a coherent, one-way process by which unique aspects of media technologies, industries, and institutions encroach upon society.

Contemporary disinformation tactics attest to the shapeshifting nature of media (Chadwick, Vaccari, & O’Loughlin 2018; Gorwa & Guilbeault 2020). In recent years, studies examined automated bots, trolls, troll farms, fake news, deepfakes, news feeds, ‘backstaging’, filter bubbles, echo chambers, synthetic media, algorithms, far/alt-right media, doxing, swatting, and other phenomena. We note here that hardly any new concepts refer to these developments as something to embrace; rather, they present a depressing picture of gloom and doom for society. This demoralising vocabulary is not only revelatory about troubling developments for public life and democracy but is also symptomatic of previous gaps in the analytical toolkit. Media and communication studies lacked the terminology to understand a slew of new media platforms and practices. Given constant media innovations, conceptual updates and repurposing become inevitable.

The lesson of the evolution of ‘media’ as a concept is twofold. Existing concepts should be approached cautiously to determine their semantic validity and analytical usefulness in new scenarios. Secondly an open attitude is essential to generate concepts that capture novel initiatives and developments.

Dis/misinformation

Unlike the concept of ‘media’, disinformation and misinformation possess clearer meanings. They refer to different phenomena, even though sometimes, they are carelessly and interchangeably used. Disinformation is the deliberate dissemination of false information for political, economic, and other benefits. Misinformation refers to unintentional dissemination of incorrect information (Wardle & Derakhshan 2018). Whereas disinformation agents know that they disseminate false information in their attempts to deceive others, misinformed citizens are largely unaware that they consume and share false content.

The recent spike in scholarly and popular attention to both concepts reflects empirical developments: namely, the presence of new, insidious forms of disinformation by states and other actors, especially in the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election and the 2016 UK Brexit referendum, as well as novel disinformation practices on digital platforms.

Neither dis/misinformation nor the phenomena they refer to are strictly new. Disinformation is conceptually close to propaganda. Both refer to spreading information and ideas linked to the exercise of power. However, there is an important distinction. Whereas disinformation emphasises deliberate deception through fabrications, propaganda may consist of disseminating selective ideas that are not necessarily demonstrably false. Praising the nation, publicising half-truths, leaving out inconvenient facts, inculcating dogmas, and puffery are typical of propaganda by states, corporations, and other powerful actors. They are part of the arsenal used to confuse public opinion, gain political support, and draw economic benefits. But these actions do not exclusively spread outright falsehoods in the same manner of disinformation campaigns. Propaganda blends exaggerations, one-sided arguments, and false/pseudo facts.

Governments are renewing propaganda strategies by taking advantage of digital affordances. Propaganda is no longer centralised, controlled, and activated at the top by state agencies. Instead, it is designed to engage both aware and distracted publics through networked technologies. The ‘rewiring’ of propaganda (Oates 2021) transforms old communication dynamics and muddles the identity of the original perpetrators. Citizens are now both willing and unwilling actors as recipients of dis/misinformation. Digital propaganda resorts to sophisticated techniques of data production and analysis to shape public opinion.

What is new? Despite obvious continuities with pre-digital forms of propaganda, contemporary disinformation makes it possible to target and distribute false information to billions of citizens who, in turn, can easily redistribute and replicate these deceptions. Everyone potentially can be a willing or unwilling participant, as receiver and distributor, in disinformation campaigns.

Novel forms of dis/misinformation spawn and reinvigorate interest in buzzword concepts such as ‘post-truth’. Post-truth refers to the current situation of confusion and pervasive lies. Due to the configurations of the contemporary information (dis)order, it is harder to disentangle truths from lies, to erect a single truth as dominant, and to persuade others about objective truths. Communication and information abundance make it possible to challenge any claims to truth in public.

Attaching ‘post’ implies a new condition supposedly different from a past of ‘truth’. To state the obvious, a congenial state of concord over truth was not exactly common or dominant in pre-digital times. Truths always existed in plural, no matter how much realists and objectivists insisted. Truths are partial, contested, doubted, even when opportunities to challenge truths in public were significantly more limited than today. Of course, political truths clashed with philosophical truths, as Hannan Arendt (2017) memorably argued.

So the question to ask is what, if anything, is different about present conditions and justifies the usage of ‘post-truth’? It is a matter of the structures and the dynamics of truth-telling: the ability of citizens and institutions to dispute any claim to truth and reality through personalised and mass communication. In contemporary media ecologies, anyone’s truth can be publicly challenged through rigourous methods, new facts, simple opinions, falsehoods, and disinformation.

Media abundance is a boon and a bane for dis/information. It opens new possibilities for communication grounded in democratic principles. It acts as a catalyst for citizen empowerment and the affirmation of human rights. However, the lowering of barriers to public communication presents deleterious consequences. It facilitates staggering opportunities for dis/misinformation. Powerful actors, especially governments, intelligence services, and the military, are uniquely positioned to take advantage of networked communication to pump falsehoods into the public sphere.

The severity of dis/information and its consequences are under dispute. Categorical generalisations are elusive because many factors affect the scale of disinformation and its effects on public affairs: namely, psychological processes, political context, affective polarisation, and media systems. Generally, the literature ranges from ‘strong’ to ‘minimal’ effects in ways that, unsurprisingly, echo similar positions in classic debates about media effects. Parsimonious arguments are required about when and why disinformation affects selected publics with negative consequences for democracy. Cross-national, cross-thematic studies may assist us in discerning whether, indeed, disinformation profoundly pollutes public communication on a range of issues such as politics, health, science, and the environment.

Populism

Populism is a conceptual chestnut of sociology, political science, and economics. Understandably, it remains a notoriously ambiguous concept (de la Torre 2018). Under the umbrella of ‘populism’, various forms of political traditions, parties, and movements are carelessly bandied about. Renewed global academic and journalistic interest in contemporary populism is not settling semantic debates. Despite the availability of compelling and comprehensive definitions (Cohen 2019; Müller 2017), populism remains analytically porous and open-ended. It is a conceptual Rorschach test of political, economic, and sociological interpretations.

Lately, populism is associated with dozens of contemporary leaders (such as Bolsonaro, Chavez, Correa, Duda, Duterte, Erdogan, Johnson, LePen, Maduro, Modi, Orban, Ortega, Putin, Salvi, Trump, van Grieken) and political parties and movements on the right and the left (Mounk & Kyle 2018). What do they all have in common? Do they a share a lingua franca, a political style, and a policy blueprint? If a leader constantly praises the virtue of ‘the common person’ and excoriates ‘the elites’, is it enough to call him (generally, it is ‘him’) and the movement ‘populist’? Is charismatic leadership a necessary condition of populism? Is populism the expression of cultural backlash and/or socio-economic penuries (Norris & Inglehart 2019)? Like ice cream, populists come in different varieties.

From a perspective interested in the media and communication aspects of populism, it is important to emphasise shared characteristics.

Populism refers to a style of discourse that presents a binary view of politics as neatly and essentially divided in two camps – the popular and the elites/anti-popular. Populism draws arbitrary and firm distinctions between these two camps and presents itself as the true representation of ‘the people’. It is ideologically empty, flexible, and omnivorous. It sponges up right-wing and left-wing ideologies plus myriad narratives and policies along the ideological spectrum.

Because populism favours a view of politics as pure and permanent conflict, it has no need for communication values and practices such as dialogue, tolerance, compromise, respect for difference, and listening. It dismisses dissident, critical, and independent voices. Worse, as the fractious history of populism in power shows, it actively seeks to suppress institutions, including the media, that hold it accountable. Its intolerance of criticism and tendency to ignore and disable accountability mechanisms attest to populism’s dangerous and unstable relationship with democracy.

This is a feature of populism. It is grounded in its grandiose, authoritarian claim to represent ‘the people’ as a singular actor and to portray the leader as the true plebeian hero who can do no wrong. Anyone who criticises the leader and the movement is condemned as a member of the elite, not the people – the legitimate political community. Neither criticism nor accountability are priorities for populism.

Therefore, populism eschews the use of the legal edifice of political liberalism, such as equality of rights and a system of checks and balances (Galston 2017). It deems them unnecessary and fundamentally mistaken for it believes that political sovereignty resides in ‘the people’ and ‘the movement’ that it purports to represent. This also explains why populist leaders have a tendency to strengthen executive power, reshape the political order in their image, and demand reverence and submission. Populism’s propensity to go down the authoritarian path is embedded in its political DNA.

Because populism is ideologically empty, it is parasitic on other ideologies. Populists typically rummage through the ideologies of political parties, social movements, and economic proposals. Devoid of distinctive ideological traditions, populism borrows ideas and policies from fellow travellers and tactical allies. The existence of right-wing and left-wing versions shows this unique quality of populism.

Recent cases in Latin America and Southern Europe show how left-wing populism selectively adopted ideas from socialism and communism ...