Open AccessFraming the mass media: Exploring ‘fake news’ as a frame embedded in political discourse
Author(s) -
Jan Rasmus Riebling,
Ina von der Wense
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of alternative and community media/journal of alternative and community media
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2634-4726
pISSN - 2206-5857
DOI - 10.1386/joacm_00043_1
Subject(s) - framing (construction) , politics , rhetoric , mass media , embeddedness , biology and political orientation , framing effect , political science , media studies , sociology , public relations , linguistics , history , social science , law , philosophy , archaeology , health communication
The recent growth of alternative media sites and sources has also seen the rise of an aggressive rhetoric decrying mass media or parts thereof as being untrustworthy and politically biased. While it is unclear whether the fake news debate is directly connected with this, it is surely a framing of mass media. In this article, we use techniques of quantitative text analysis in order to analyse how the fake news frame is structured and to understand its central determinants in terms of social context and political orientation. Using quantitative text analysis, we analyse the frame usage and semantic embeddedness in eight blogs. We find evidence for a generalised frame that tends to be independent of political orientation of the blog.