Abstract
‘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.
Highlights
Issue This article is part of the issue “Dark Participation in Online Communication: The World of the Wicked Web” edited by Thorsten Quandt (University of Münster, Germany)
RQ1 asked what percentage of articles published by fake news sites contain the news values of a) timeliness, b) negativity, c) prominence, and d) impact
Most of the articles analyzed do not have the news value of impact, focusing on trivial things, such as a fake news article reporting that a woman was hospitalized after she was beaten with dildos
Summary
Issue This article is part of the issue “Dark Participation in Online Communication: The World of the Wicked Web” edited by Thorsten Quandt (University of Münster, Germany). Journalism’s normative standing does not appear out of thin air but is the result of norms and routines built up over time, into which new entrants are socialized Such norms and routines help maintain journalism’s epistemic authority as a reliable arbiter of what is true and what is not (Carlson, 2017). This is what helps journalism be believed It follows, that ‘fake news’ producers would imitate the conventions of ‘real news’ to leech off of journalism’s authority and convince readers that the material presented to them is an authentic account. That ‘fake news’ producers would imitate the conventions of ‘real news’ to leech off of journalism’s authority and convince readers that the material presented to them is an authentic account This seems a logical presumption, but does it hold true? This seems a logical presumption, but does it hold true? There has already been ample research on fake news (for a review, see Tandoc, 2019) and, in particular, its ‘fakeness,’ taking into account the motivations of its producers, its conceptual contours, and its relation-
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