Russia Today and Conspiracy Theories: People, Power and Politics on RT
... As part of the Kremlin's propaganda strategy, state-run media outlets like Russia Today, Pravda, and online tools like Telegram are used in Russia and worldwide to promote the government's ideologies, viewpoints, and objectives (Abrams, 2016;Salikov, 2019). Journalists working for Russian media have to produce and distribute news and press releases that reflect well on the Russian government (Herpen, 2015;Yablokov & Chatterje-Doody, 2021). Due to the extreme control of the media and the manipulation of information, Russians rarely hear other points of view about the Ukraine crisis (Makhortykh & Bastian, 2022). ...
The Russia-Ukraine crisis began in 1991 when Ukraine became independent following the fall of the Soviet Union. The arrival of Putin to power in Russia and his 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula sparked a crisis in which disinformation became one of the main weapons. Journalists working for Russian government-affiliated media were required to echo Kremlin propaganda and disinformation on the crisis. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine led to a repetition of Putin's use of disinformation to justify the invasion. Liz Wahl of Russia Today, Washington DC, and Marina Ovsyannikova of Channel One Russia, resisted Kremlin propaganda on live television. This study explores how Al Jazeera, the BBC, and CNN portrayed this resistance. A qualitative textual analysis was carried out within the theoretical framework of journalistic ethics and paradigm repair. It was found that Al Jazeera, the BBC, and CNN covered the resistance extensively in solidarity with their colleagues and in support of media freedom.
... In general, Sputnik's and RT's news coverage about Sweden took an insider perspective (see also Yablokov & Chatterje-Doody, 2022). This means first and foremost that the sources, be they actors or media platforms and institutions, tended to be domestic. ...
This chapter is a summary of the study of Russian disinformation about Sweden. By analysing news narratives of the Russian state-affiliated media RT and Sputnik from July 2019 to January 2021, it is shown how international news media is used for disinformation. The study builds on previous work by Wagnsson and Barzanje (A framework for analysing antagonistic narrative strategies: A Russian tale of Swedish decline. Media War and Conflict, 14 (2), 239–257. https://doi.org/10-1177/17506352119884343 , 2021), which identified denigrating narrative strategies in Sputnik coverage of Sweden. This study covers a later time period and centers on the story telling techniques of the news coverage in order to make manifest how disinformation differs from journalism. It is argued that this type of disinformation is an everyday security practice and not limited to specific events such as for example elections campaigns. This was confirmed by the analysis which identified a relatively fixed set of narratives that included a variety of news topics and which were similar to what was found by Wagnsson and Barzanje in an earlier time period. The analysis resulted in the identification of a master narrative that was named a failing state victim to liberal ideas, and was composed of four narratives that explained how: (a) the liberal left elite was a threat to traditional Sweden; (b) the obsession with gender led Sweden astray giving rise both to health issues among the population and to social and political problems; (c) Sweden experienced an Islamic takeover; and (d) how Sweden defied limitations to its liberal policies during the pandemic.
... This enables me to undertake a more in-depth analysis and demonstrate in greater detail how the stories are constructed and the type of reporting that is being done. In so doing, special attention is paid to a number of different storytelling techniques, notably: (a) the narrative perspective from within (see also Yablokov & Chatterje-Doody, 2022); (b) the instigation of polarization; (c) the overlap of narratives/topics; (d) misuse of key concepts and choice of words to name phenomena, confuse their meanings, use concepts inaccurately, and repetition of concepts with slight variations; (e) mockery by way of "citations", "the so-called"; and (f) use of experts. These storytelling techniques are presented in Chap. 3 and discussed in Chap. 10 in connection with the harmful narratives identified in the analysis. ...
The chapter introduces disinformation as a security problem performed by international news reporting that are used by authoritarian regimes. The concept of disinformation is defined and discussed in relation to other concepts in the field of information influence activities, such as propaganda, digital propaganda, network propaganda, rewired propaganda, and fake news. It is argued that disinformation is not merely used to denigrate a foreign country, but to cause domestic unrest and tension in the target state by instilling doubts about the authenticity of all information and sowing mistrust between citizens and the state. The Russian Federation is known to employ disinformation as part of its security strategy in this sense and the latter part of the chapter argues that narrative and framing analyses can disclose how such harmful narratives are constructed to target foreign states. A Swedish case study of Sputnik news coverage using narrative analysis showed consistent denigrating narratives between 2014 and 2018 (Wagnsson & Barzanje, A framework for analysing antagonistic narrative strategies: A Russian tale of Swedish decline. Media War and Conflict, 14 (2), 239–257. https://doi.org10-1177/17506352119884343 , 2021). In an in-depth study of Sputnik and RT-coverage of 2019 and 2020 insights into the construction of such harmful narratives has been further developed making up this book. The chapter ends with a presentation of the structure of the book.
... As part of the Kremlin's propaganda strategy, state-run media outlets like Russia Today, Pravda, and online tools like Telegram, are used in Russia and worldwide to promote the government's ideologies, viewpoints, and objectives (Abrams, 2016;Salikov, 2019). Journalists working for Russian media have to produce and distribute news and press releases that reflect well on the Russian government (Herpen, 2015;Yablokov & Chatterje-Doody, 2021). Due to the extreme control of the media and the manipulation of information, Russians rarely hear other points of view about the Ukraine crisis (Makhortykh & Bastian, 2022). ...
The Russia-Ukraine crisis is an ethno-religious and geopolitical crisis with a long history. It flared up once again in 1991 when Ukraine became independent following the fall of the Soviet Union. The arrival of Putin to power in Russia and his 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula sparked a crisis in which disinformation became one of the main weapons. Journalists working for Russian- and Russian government-affiliated media were required to echo Kremlin propaganda and disinformation (both concepts are used interchangeably in this study) on the crisis. However, some journalists resisted this demand. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to a repetition of Putin's use of disinformation to justify the invasion. Journalists were again expected to spread Kremlin disinformation to further Kremlin goals. This thesis explores the use of propaganda and disinformation in the Russia-Ukraine wars of 2014 and 2022, using as a case study of two Russian government media journalists, Liz Wahl and Marina Ovsyannikova, who publicly resisted Kremlin propaganda. The study also explores the role of gender in the Russian journalistic field and examines female resistance to war propaganda in the context of journalistic paradigm repair. Finally, the thesis examines how Al Jazeera (Qatar), the BBC, and CNN portrayed the resistance. The study was carried out within the framework of the following theoretical perspectives: gender and international journalism, journalistic fields, journalistic ethics, and journalistic paradigm repair. The study uses historical and textual analyses to explore the resistance activities of female journalists and international media portrayals of that resistance. It was found that, in the Russian journalistic field, women journalists were prominent against authoritarian disinformation and criticizing governments. These two female journalists, Liz Wahl and Marina Ovsyannikova were willing to publicly resist authoritarian disinformation because of their journalistic ethics and in defense of the journalistic paradigm, despite the consequences they faced. On the other hand, Al Jazeera, the BBC, and CNN covered the resistance extensively in support of their colleagues and in solidarity with media freedom.
... rt.com is the website of the Russian Television (RT) network, known to spread disinformation [95]. As documented by Yablokov et al. [116], RT and the Russian government have consistently engaged with conspiracy theories as a form of public diplomacy. 199 different authentic news websites hyperlink to articles from rt.com including nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com. ...
Do we live in a "Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories?" In the last few decades, conspiracy theories have proliferated on the Internet with some having dangerous real-world consequences. A large contingent of those who participated in the January 6th attack on the US Capitol believed fervently in the QAnon conspiracy theory. In this work, we study the relationships amongst five prominent conspiracy theories (QAnon, COVID, UFO/Aliens, 9-11, and Flat-Earth) and each of their respective relationships to the news media, both mainstream and fringe. Identifying and publishing a set of 755 different conspiracy theory websites dedicated to our five conspiracy theories, we find that each set often hyperlinks to the same external domains, with COVID and QAnon conspiracy theory websites largest amount of shared connections. Examining the role of news media, we further find that not only do outlets known for spreading misinformation hyperlink to our set of conspiracy theory websites more often than mainstream websites but this hyperlinking has increased dramatically between 2018 and 2021, with the advent of QAnon and the start of COVID-19 pandemic. Using partial Granger-causality, we uncover several positive correlative relationships between the hyperlinks from misinformation websites and the popularity of conspiracy theory websites, suggesting the prominent role that misinformation news outlets play in popularizing many conspiracy theories.
This chapter delineates a threefold claim that nativist populists put forth in their support of the people. Initially, they tend to fabricate an external threat to the inner nation discursively. Subsequently, they levy accusations against a domestic elite, alleging treachery against the populace, often portraying them as colluding with external foes. Lastly, they cast themselves as the authentic guardians of the ‘pure people,’ pledging protection against both the elite and these malevolent foreign entities—entities they have themselves rhetorically constructed. In the current landscape of post-truth politics, conspiracy theories stand out as one of the most effective rhetorical strategies populist leaders can use. In the chapter, the commonalities between populist conspiratorial ideologues, transcending national and thematic boundaries will be illuminated. The discourse will centre on three salient contemporary conspiracy theories: the notion of Eurabia in Europe, the Deep State in the United States, and anti-Western narratives in Russia. The analysis will reveal how populist figures employ Neo-Nationalist rhetoric in these instances, thereby ideologically conjuring threats from beyond the nation's borders, denouncing domestic elites as traitors who have surrendered the people to adversaries, and portraying themselves as the genuine protectors of the unblemished populace against both the compromised elite and these fabricated external threats.
This chapter introduces the two Russian state-affiliated news media organizations, Sputnik and RT, and provides background on their development. It also discusses what is known about their journalistic culture with regard to organization and journalistic style. Scholars have highlighted that although they are international news organizations producing and disseminating information and current affairs for a global audience, in a similar way to other news media outlets, there are significant differences between RT/Sputnik and news organizations such as BBC World or CNN International. These differences in journalistic ethos have a bearing on the storytelling techniques used, and these are therefore also analyzed in this chapter. Finally the chapter presents previous research findings on the audiences for RT and Sputnik, why people turn to these channels and how they perceive and engage with the news content. Having thus positioned RT and Sputnik as international news organizations and given an account of what is known about audience reception of their messaging, Chap. 3 focuses on how RT and Sputnik have used disinformation and targeted various states.
Dış politikayı, iç politika ile ilişkisi ve çok katmanlı olarak incelediğimiz bu makalede “sıradan” bireylerin dış politika algılarına odaklanmaktayız. Bu bağlamda, makalenin amacı kurumsal dış politika mekanizmalarına dahil olmayan bireylerin gündelik anlatılarında vuku bulduğu haliyle dış politika algılarının komplo anlatılarıyla nasıl ilişkilendiğini göstermektir. Bu makale boyunca öne sürdüğümüz savlar 2021 ve 2022 yıllarında farklı safhalarda gerçekleştirdiğimiz odak görüşmelerine dayanmaktadır. Araştırma bulgularımız komplo anlatılarının dış politikayı nasıl anlaşılabilir kıldığını ve bu anlaşılabilir kılma işlevi ile alttan yukarı bir toplumsal etki yarattığını göstermektedir. Ana argümanımız komplo anlatılarının temelini “dış güçler” ekseninde geliştirilen ve Türk dış politikasındaki gelişmeleri Türkiye’nin diğer uluslararası aktörlerle mücadelesi olarak değerlendiren anlatıların oluşturduğudur. Bu anlatıyla ilişkili olarak, ekonomik sorunları dış güçlerin müdahalesi ve manipülasyonları olarak gören anlatılar da gündelik deneyim ve sorunların dış politikayla ilişkilendirilmesine dair bir örnek oluşturmaktadır. Son olarak ise bu anlatılarda ortaya çıkan kabil, egemen ve özel bir “biz” algısı ulusal kimlik çevresinde geliştirilen söylemlerle dış politika algısının ilişkisini göstermektedir. Makale, dış politikanın komplo teorileri aracılığıyla gündelik söylemlere nasıl sirayet ettiğini inceleyerek pek çok disipliner ve interdisipliner tartışmaya katkı yapmaktadır.
Norm contestation is a burgeoning area of research within International Relations (IR), particularly in the context of the evolving multi-order world. While critical constructivists have shed light on the dialogical nature of norm evolution and the significant role of discourses in norm construction, they have given little attention to the communicational process underlying these discourses. This paper argues that state-funded international broadcasters play a pivotal role in the contestation of the validity, meaning, and applicatory parameters of international norms. Unlike institutional contexts, international broadcasters do not contest norms through arguments but by projecting narratives using strategic assemblages of verbal, aural, and visual elements. Through an analysis of RT's coverage of the Ukraine Crisis (2014), the paper explicates how Russian state-sponsored propaganda has employed techniques such as liberal performance, liberal mimicry, civilizational essentialization, and counter-norm entrepreneurship to advance a favourable understanding of norms for Russia. The paper aims to contribute to the scholarship on norm contestation by authoritarian states, particularly by applying and attesting to Bettiza and Lewis's (2020) typology of norm contestation. Furthermore, it seeks to explore and theorize the relationship between norms and narratives in the ever-shifting global media ecology.
The article retrospectively looks at Russia’s strategic communication during the Ukraine crisis (2013–2014) in light of the ongoing Russian-Ukraine conflicts. Russia’s strategic communication campaign, especially the sophisticated use of state-sponsored international broadcaster-Russia Today (RT)-has been proven to raise sympathy, distract attention and delay effective reactions from the Ukranian government and NATO. RT’s strategic mediatisation of the Ukraine crisis not only fermented a favourable environment for Russia’s annexation of Crimea but set up the meta-narratives and operational framework for the subsequent influence operation practiced by the Russian government during the current Russo-Ukraine war. The article adopts a multimodal discourse analysis to elicit RT’s identity narratives about three main actors during the Ukraine crisis: Russia, the West, and Ukraine. By analysing RT’s YouTube audio-visual representation of the Ukraine crisis, the research finds that RT has applied a victimisation strategy to legitimise Russia’s military intervention in the Annexation of Crimea as a defencive counterattack. The West is accused of provoking a divide between Russia and Ukraine and being an unreliable partner and hypocritical norm-upholder. The Ukrainian components are dichotomously represented. While the pro-Eu protestors and the interim government are framed in line with violence, disorder, and neo-Nazism, the ejected pro-Russian Yanukovych government is legitimised as a democratically elected government, and its policy is aggressively crushed by the pro-Eu protestors. The empirical research suggests that RT’s discursive construction of the Ukraine crisis is built on a divisive script between a victimised pro-Russia club and an aggressive pro-EU camp. By reflecting upon RT’s strategic mediatisation of the Ukraine crisis, the paper seeks to illuminate the historical continuance and variation of Russia’s strategic communication in the post-cold war era. It thus aims to make a meaningful addition to the study of Russian propaganda and shed historical insights to make sense of Russia’s ever-intensifying information campaign during the ongoing Russo-Ukraine War.
p>Conspiracism is a well‐known topos in the history of humankind. Cassius Dio wrote about it as did anti‐Judaic authors in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, from the dawn of modernity until today, we have faced the rise of a new phenomenon. Pretty much on the eve of the French Revolution, conspiracists began to tell anti‐Catholic and anti‐masonic narratives down to the last detail. Jews, later on, became a recurring foe in those anti‐modernist narratives. Conspiracism managed successfully to incorporate other forms of anti‐modernism to form a fairly new form of thinking that I call “conspiracist ideology.” While Enlightenment was the setting in which this amalgamation could take place, conspiracist ideology and its intellectual roots were characterized by a deep rejection of enlightenment thinking. The dialectical nature of conspiracist ideology is what makes it interesting from a historical perspective, in particular for the history of ideas.</p
Russian disinformation exploits social problems in foreign states to undermine people’s trust and breed conspiracy theories. Tackling it is difficult but feasible.
This article advances extant research that has audited search algorithms for misinformation in four respects. Firstly, this is the first misinformation audit not to implement a national but a cross-national research design. Secondly, it retrieves results not in response to the most popular query terms. Instead, it theorizes two semantic dimensions of search terms and illustrates how they impact the number of misinformative results returned. Furthermore, the analysis not only captures the mere presence of misinformative content but in addition whether the source websites are affiliated with a key misinformation actor (Russia’s ruling elites) and whom the conspiracy narratives cast as the malicious plotters. Empirically, the audit compares Covid-19 conspiracy theories in Google search results across 5 key target countries of Russia’s foreign communication (Belarus, Estonia, Germany, Ukraine, and the US) and Russia as of November 2020 (N = 5280 search results). It finds that, across all countries, primarily content published by mass media organizations rendered conspiracy theories visible in search results. Conspiratorial content published on websites affiliated with Russia’s ruling elites was retrieved in the Belarusian, German and Russian contexts. Across all countries, the majority of conspiracy narratives suspected plotters from China. Malicious actors from the US were insinuated exclusively by sources affiliated with Russia’s elites. Overall, conspiracy narratives did not primarily deepen divides within but between national communities, since – across all countries – only plotters from beyond the national borders were blamed. To conclude, the article discusses methodological advice and promising paths of research for future cross-national search engine audits.
As conspiracy theories have become a popular form of political discourse worldwide, states have promoted conspiratorial ideas to advance their foreign policy goals. Yet, despite recent attention to the spread of propaganda abroad, scholars have not addressed whether and how conspiracy theories spread across borders. This study assesses this question in the post-Soviet region, by examining the relationship between exposure to Russian state propaganda and belief in conspiracy theories in two countries that border the Russian Federation. Analyzing data from an original survey of Georgia and Kazakhstan indicates that exposure to Russian propaganda through television, social media, or websites has minimal effects on respondents’ endorsement of conspiracy theories. Respondents in Kazakhstan, and especially ethnic Russians, are likely to endorse pro-Russian conspiracy claims that are frequently propagated, owing to preexisting affinities. Yet the most consistent predictor of conspiracy beliefs is alienation from the political system, which occurs independent of foreign media consumption. The findings cast doubt on the ability of states to shape the attitudes of citizens abroad through the media and shine light on the domestic political factors underlying belief in conspiracy theories.
Under the premise that the use of alternative news frames is a key characteristic of alternative media, this study examines frame repertoires of alleged mainstream media and right-wing alternative media (RAM) in Germany. This endeavor is based on quantitative content analyses of eighteen news websites, including seven RAM, on two issues: immigration and the coalition talks following the German federal elections 2017. In multidimensional scaling models, we inspect how the media outlets relate to each other. The results show two types of RAM that deviate from the mainstream in different ways. The first type is clearly distinguishable by its interpretive style and heavy use of alternative frames. Media of this type openly oppose immigration, the German government and mainstream media. The second type, consisting of international news providers like RT, exhibits a more descriptive style and frame repertories that are similar to conservative mainstream media. We discuss this as a strategy to establish credibility and highlight perspectives for further research on RAM.
Scholars predicted that official Russian commemorations of the centenary of the 1917 revolutions would prioritise ‘reconciliation and accord’ between pro- and anti-communists. Such a frame might help construct a new post-Soviet Russian identity. Yet, in 2017, state-affiliated political and media actors gave accounts that contrasted with their previous narratives and with each other. Domestic state-aligned media were unprecedentedly negative about the revolutions’ events and enduring legacies, while Russia’s international broadcaster, Russia Today, emphasised the revolutions’ positive international legacies. We explain this paradox by arguing that regimes of commemoration are directly related to political systems: in neo-authoritarian regimes such as contemporary Russia, history is not used primarily for nation-building, but to build legitimacy for the ruling regime. Referencing similar practices in other neo-authoritarian regimes, we show how state-affiliated actors selectively co-opt interpretations of historical events that circulate in the global media ecology, to ‘arrest’ the ‘memory of the multitude’. Simultaneously, they reinforce core messages that legitimise the existing government.
The study of populism has often focused on specific leaders or movements within nation-states. Such accounts approach the media as a dissemination tool of these ‘populist actors’, rather than as a producer of populism in itself. However, the ongoing development of new media technologies makes such an approach untenable. With populism understood as a particular set of communication logics in which core appeals are articulated, the contemporary global media environment has fundamentally altered the processes by which such appeals evolve, including the range of voices that contribute to that evolution. Where empirically-observable populism was once predominantly a national phenomenon, this is decreasingly the case. On- and offline transnational collaboration is becoming increasingly common, together with the emergence of genuinely international movements. This chapter updates discussions of populism and the media, by offering an empirically-grounded discussion of how new media technologies facilitate transnational co-production and dissemination of populist appeals amongst both core and peripheral audiences. Our discussions of legacy media developments, online grassroots campaigning and state-funded international broadcasting show how media actors themselves (including particular platforms) contribute to the production of populist messages and identities, especially because new media logics closely correspond to the needs of populist communication.
The “deep state” conspiracy theory is evergreen in Turkish politics. Why is it so popular, and why do political elites continually turn to different forms of this conspiracy theory? This chapter focuses on an amorphous but significant conspiracy theory, the deep state, which argues that a clandestine elite group is determined to defend the Turkish state ideology and the political stability by legal, and often illegal, means. While all political parties in the Turkish parliament talk about the existence of the deep state, they do not agree on who it is, largely because of their contradictory partisan interests. This creates incompatible definitions of the deep state, which cannot convince all parties. In short, partisan conflict ensures the continuity of the deep state conspiracy theory.
The 2016 U.S. presidential election brought considerable attention to the phenomenon of “fake news”: entirely fabricated and often partisan content that is presented as factual. Here we demonstrate one mechanism that contributes to the believability of fake news: fluency via prior exposure. Using actual fake-news headlines presented as they were seen on Facebook, we show that even a single exposure increases subsequent perceptions of accuracy, both within the same session and after a week. Moreover, this “illusory truth effect” for fake-news headlines occurs despite a low level of overall believability and even when the stories are labeled as contested by fact checkers or are inconsistent with the reader’s political ideology. These results suggest that social media platforms help to incubate belief in blatantly false news stories and that tagging such stories as disputed is not an effective solution to this problem. It is interesting, however, that we also found that prior exposure does not impact entirely implausible statements (e.g., “The earth is a perfect square”). These observations indicate that although extreme implausibility is a boundary condition of the illusory truth effect, only a small degree of potential plausibility is sufficient for repetition to increase perceived accuracy. As a consequence, the scope and impact of repetition on beliefs is greater than has been previously assumed.
Extant findings show that voter fraud is extremely rare and difficult to prove in the United States. Voter’s knowledge about voter fraud allegations likely comes through the media, who tend to sensationalize the issue. In this study, we argue that the more voters are exposed to media coverage of voter fraud allegations, the more likely that they will perceive that voter fraud is a frequent problem. We merge the 2012 Survey of Performance of American Elections with state-level media coverage of voter fraud leading up to the 2012 election. Our results show that media coverage of voter fraud is associated with public beliefs about voter fraud. In states where fraud was more frequently featured in local media outlets, public concerns about voter fraud were heightened. In particular, we find that press attention to voter fraud has a larger influence on Republicans than Democrats and Independents. We further find that media coverage of voter fraud does not further polarize partisan perceptions of voter fraud. Rather, political interest moderates state media coverage on voter fraud beliefs only among Republicans. Last, our results provide no support that demographic changes, approval of election administration, or information concerning actual reported voting irregularities have any discernable effects on partisan perceptions.
As the number and the diversity of news outlets on the Web grows, so does the opportunity for "alternative" sources of information to emerge. Using large social networks like Twitter and Facebook, misleading, false, or agenda-driven information can quickly and seamlessly spread online, deceiving people or influencing their opinions. Also, the increased engagement of tightly knit communities, such as Reddit and 4chan, further compounds the problem, as their users initiate and propagate alternative information, not only within their own communities, but also to different ones as well as various social media. In fact, these platforms have become an important piece of the modern information ecosystem, which, thus far, has not been studied as a whole.
In this paper, we begin to fill this gap by studying mainstream and alternative news shared on Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan. By analyzing millions of posts around several axes, we measure how mainstream and alternative news flows between these platforms. Our results indicate that alt-right communities within 4chan and Reddit can have a surprising level of influence on Twitter, providing evidence that "fringe" communities often succeed in spreading alternative news to mainstream social networks and the greater Web.
We explore the relationship between populist attitudes and conspiratorial beliefs on the individual level with two studies using American samples. First, we test whether and what kinds of conspiratorial beliefs predict populist attitudes. Our results show that belief in conspiracies with greedy, but not necessarily purely evil, elites are associated with populism. Second, we test whether having a conspiratorial mentality is associated with all separate sub-dimensions of populist attitudes – people-centrism, anti-elitism, and a good-versus-evil view of politics. Results show a relation only with the first two, confirming the common tendency of both discourses to see the masses as victims on elites’ hands. These findings contribute to research on the correlates of populism at the individual level, which is essential to understanding why this phenomenon is so strong in contemporary democracies.
This study examines the agenda-setting power of fake news and fact-checkers who fight them through a computational look at the online mediascape from 2014 to 2016. Although our study confirms that content from fake news websites is increasing, these sites do not exert excessive power. Instead, fake news has an intricately entwined relationship with online partisan media, both responding and setting its issue agenda. In 2016, partisan media appeared to be especially susceptible to the agendas of fake news, perhaps due to the election. Emerging news media are also responsive to the agendas of fake news, but to a lesser degree. Fake news coverage itself is diverging and becoming more autonomous topically. While fact-checkers are autonomous in their selection of issues to cover, they were not influential in determining the agenda of news media overall, and their influence appears to be declining, illustrating the difficulties fact-checkers face in disseminating their corrections.
What psychological factors drive the popularity of conspiracy theories that explain important events as secret plots by powerful and malevolent groups? What are the psychological consequences of adopting these theories? We review the current research, and find that it answers the first of these questions more thoroughly than the second. Belief in conspiracy theories appears to be driven by motives that can be characterized as epistemic (understanding one’s environment), existential (being safe and in control of one’s environment) and social (maintaining a positive image of the self and the social group). However, little research has investigated the consequences of conspiracy belief, and to date, this research does not indicate that conspiracy belief fulfills people’s motivations. Instead, for many people conspiracy belief may be more appealing than satisfying. Further research is needed to determine for whom, and under what conditions, conspiracy theories may satisfy key psychological motives.
People frequently continue to use inaccurate information in their reasoning even after a credible retraction has been presented. This phenomenon is often referred to as the continued influence effect of misinformation. The repetition of the original misconception within a retraction could contribute to this phenomenon, as it could inadvertently make the “myth” more familiar—and familiar information is more likely to be accepted as true. From a dual-process perspective, familiarity-based acceptance of myths is most likely to occur in the absence of strategic memory processes. We thus examined factors known to affect whether strategic memory processes can be utilized; age, detail, and time. Participants rated their belief in various statements of unclear veracity, and facts were subsequently affirmed and myths were retracted. Participants then re-rated their belief either immediately or after a delay. We compared groups of young and older participants, and we manipulated the amount of detail presented in the affirmative/corrective explanations, as well as the retention interval between encoding and a retrieval attempt. We found that (1) older adults over the age of 65 were worse at sustaining their post-correction belief that myths were inaccurate, (2) a greater level of explanatory detail promoted more sustained belief change, and (3) fact affirmations promoted more sustained belief change in comparison to myth retractions over the course of one week (but not over three weeks). This supports the notion that familiarity is indeed a driver of continued influence effects.
Smashing initial hopes for more radical and speedier changes in Russia, elements of the Soviet system of managerial and ideological control proved to be obstinately persistent. Certain practices reminiscent of the informal functioning of the Soviet nomenklatura continue unabated primarily in politics, but also in Russian media. This article argues that nomenklatura practices are still a fixed part in organization management in Russian media today, securing the loyalty of journalists and controlling the output of the news media. The analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews and three case studies, scrutinizing media managers’ professional biographies, directs to a non-intuitive development; namely, that it is not necessarily those who have experienced the Soviet nomenklatura closely and in person who were most active in applying and perpetuating nomenklatura practices, but also those who were either remote from these power structures or too young.
Editor's note: This is the longest text ever published by The Moscow Times. We've decided to publish it because it describes in detail a key Russian narrative, of how the Kremlin rules the country with the help of the controlled media. It is a bitter story of how the Russian media, with very few exceptions, have abandoned, sometimes through coercion, but mostly voluntarily and even eagerly, their mission of informing the public and have turned into creators of the Matrix-like artificial reality where imaginary heroes and villains battle tooth and nail in Russia's Armageddon.
Many claim that populism in the Netherlands has grown over the last 10 years; that it spreads among mainstream parties; that its success has to do with the media, who pay more and more attention to populist parties and immigration issues; but that it is difficult to distinguish between political populism intended for the media and populism by the media. In a longitudinal content analysis of newspapers, television news, talk shows and party political broadcasts, covering seven elections in nearly 20 years, these claims are put to the test. The picture that emerges is far more ambiguous than publicized opinion suggests, with no clear trend but a downward one in 2012.
Recent studies on conspiracy theories employ standardized questionnaires, thus neglecting their narrative qualities by reducing them to mere statements. Recipients are considered as consumers only. Two empirical studies-a conventional survey (n = 63) and a study using the method of narrative construction (n = 30)-which were recently conducted by the authors of this paper-suggest that the truth about conspiracy theories is more complex. Given a set of statements about a dramatic historic event (in our case 9/11) that includes official testimonies, allegations to a conspiracy and extremely conspiratorial statements, the majority of participants created a narrative of 9/11 they deemed plausible that might be considered a conspiracy theory. The resulting 30 idiosyncratic stories imply that no clear distinction between official story and conspiratorial narrative is possible any more when the common approach of questionnaires is abandoned. Based on these findings, we present a new theoretical and methodological approach which acknowledges conspiracy theories as a means of constructing and communicating a set of personal values. While broadening the view upon such theories, we stay compatible with other approaches that have focused on extreme theory types. In our view, accepting conspiracy theories as a common, regulative and possibly benign phenomenon, we will be better able to understand why some people cling to immunized, racist and off-wall stories-and others do not.
Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: A self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of mutually supportive beliefs. The present research shows that even mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively correlated in endorsement. In Study 1 (n = 137), the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered. In Study 2 (n = 102), the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive. Hierarchical regression models showed that mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively associated because both are associated with the view that the authorities are engaged in a cover-up (Study 2). The monological nature of conspiracy belief appears to be driven not by conspiracy theories directly supporting one another but by broader beliefs supporting conspiracy theories in general.
The election of Donald Trump and the great disruption in the news and social media.
Donald Trump's election as the 45th President of the United States came as something of a surprise—to many analysts, journalists, and voters. The New York Times's The Upshot gave Hillary Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning the White House even as the returns began to come in. What happened? And what role did the news and social media play in the election? In Trump and the Media, journalism and technology experts grapple with these questions in a series of short, thought-provoking essays. Considering the disruption of the media landscape, the disconnect between many voters and the established news outlets, the emergence of fake news and “alternative facts,” and Trump's own use of social media, these essays provide a window onto broader transformations in the relationship between information and politics in the twenty-first century.
The contributors find historical roots to current events in Cold War notions of "us" versus "them," trace the genealogy of the assault on facts, and chart the collapse of traditional news gatekeepers. They consider such topics as Trump's tweets (diagnosed by one writer as “Twitterosis”) and the constant media exposure given to Trump during the campaign. They propose photojournalists as visual fact checkers (“lessons of the paparazzi”) and debate whether Trump's administration is authoritarian or just authoritarian-like. Finally, they consider future strategies for the news and social media to improve the quality of democratic life.
Contributors Mike Ananny, Chris W. Anderson, Rodney Benson, Pablo J. Boczkowski, danah boyd, Robyn Caplan, Michael X. Delli Carpini, Josh Cowls, Susan J. Douglas, Keith N. Hampton, Dave Karpf, Daniel Kreiss, Seth C. Lewis, Zoey Lichtenheld, Andrew L. Mendelson, Gina Neff, Zizi Papacharissi, Katy E. Pearce, Victor Pickard, Sue Robinson, Adrienne Russell, Ralph Schroeder, Michael Schudson, Julia Sonnevend, Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Tina Tucker, Fred Turner, Nikki Usher, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Silvio Waisbord, Barbie Zelizer
The Attic orators, whose works are an invaluable source on the social and political history of Classical Athens, often filled their speeches with charges of conspiracy involving almost every facet of Athenian life. There are allegations of plots against men's lives, property, careers, and reputations, as well as charges of conspiracy against the public interest, the government, the management of foreign affairs, and more. Until now, however, this obsession with conspiracy has received little scholarly attention. In order to develop the first full picture of this important feature of Athenian discourse, this book examines the range and nature of the conspiracy charges. The author asks why they were so popular, and considers their rhetorical, cultural, and psychological significance. He also investigates the historical likelihood of the scenarios advanced for these plots, and asks what their prevalence suggests about the Athenians and their worldview. The author concludes by comparing ancient and modern conspiracy theories. In addition to shedding new light on Athenian history and culture, his study provides a perspective on the use of conspiracy as a rhetorical ploy.
Cyberwar examines the ways in which Russian interventions not only affected the behaviors of key players but altered the 2016 presidential campaign’s media and social media landscape. After laying out a theory of influence that explains how Russian activities could have produced effects, Jamieson documents the hackers and trolls’ influence on the topics in the news, the questions in the presidential debates, and the social media stream. Drawing on her analysis of messages crafted and amplified by Russian operatives, changes that Russian-hacked content elicited in news and the debates, the scholarly work of other researchers, and Annenberg surveys, she concludes that it is plausible to believe that Russian machinations helped elect Donald J. Trump the 45 th president of the United States.
Conspiracy theories have been around for a long time, though how long is a matter of debate. As for the concept of conspiracy theory, it might seem reasonable to expect a more exact answer about the moment of its emergence. When do we first find people talking and writing about conspiracy theories? While much of the literature points to the twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper and his famous work The Open Society and Its Enemies (1st edition: 1945), newspaper databases allow us to locate earlier occurrences of “conspiracy theory.” They reveal that the term proliferates in newspapers from the 1870s onward, particularly after the assassination of President Garfield in July 1881. What can this discovery then tell us about the modern-day phenomenon of conspiracy theories?
This article argues that accounts of the Russian media system that tend to view the time from Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 2000 as a single homogenous period do not capture major qualitative shifts in state-controlled media coverage. By analyzing the output of Russia’s two main television channels during Putin’s third presidential term, we identify a range of distinctly new features that amount to a new media strategy. This involves a significant increase in the coverage of political issues through the replacement of infotainment with what we term agitainment—an ideologically inflected content that, through adapting global media formats to local needs, attempts to appeal to less engaged and even sceptical viewers. Despite the tightening of political control over the media following the annexation of Crimea, the new strategy paradoxically has strengthened the constitutive role played by the state-controlled broadcasters in the articulation of official discourse.
A firsthand account and incisive analysis of modern protest, revealing internet-fueled social movements' greatest strengths and frequent challenges. To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti-Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today's social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests-how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change. Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul's Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture-and offer essential insights into the future of governance.
American society has changed dramatically since A Culture of Conspiracy was first published in 2001. In this revised and expanded edition, Michael Barkun delves deeper into America's conspiracy sub-culture, exploring the rise of 9/11 conspiracy theories, the "birther" controversy surrounding Barack Obama's American citizenship, and how the conspiracy landscape has changed with the rise of the Internet and other new media. What do UFO believers, Christian millennialists, and right-wing conspiracy theorists have in common? According to Michael Barkun in this fascinating yet disturbing book, quite a lot. It is well known that some Americans are obsessed with conspiracies. The Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the 2001 terrorist attacks have all generated elaborate stories of hidden plots. What is far less known is the extent to which conspiracist worldviews have recently become linked in strange and unpredictable ways with other "fringe" notions such as a belief in UFOs, Nostradamus, and the Illuminati. Unraveling the extraordinary genealogies and permutations of these increasingly widespread ideas, Barkun shows how this web of urban legends has spread among subcultures on the Internet and through mass media, how a new style of conspiracy thinking has recently arisen, and how this phenomenon relates to larger changes in American culture. This book, written by a leading expert on the subject, is the most comprehensive and authoritative examination of contemporary American conspiracism to date. Barkun discusses a range of material-involving inner-earth caves, government black helicopters, alien abductions, secret New World Order cabals, and much more-that few realize exists in our culture. Looking closely at the manifestations of these ideas in a wide range of literature and source material from religious and political literature, to New Age and UFO publications, to popular culture phenomena such as The X-Files, and to websites, radio programs, and more, Barkun finds that America is in the throes of an unrivaled period of millenarian activity. His book underscores the importance of understanding why this phenomenon is now spreading into more mainstream segments of American culture.
Brand pages in social media are a great way to foster consumer gathering around a brand, but it can be challenging to keep fans engaged and coming back to see updated content. Brands with millions of fans on Facebook have seen organic reach fall below 2% of their base. In this article, we describe how the creation of virtual brand communities can help brand managers increase fan engagement. We suggest the steps, conditions, advantages, and limitations involved in nurturing a brand page as an online social gathering that assumes some of the characteristics of a virtual brand community. The results of our study show that a brand page can have some of the characteristics of a virtual brand community—topical information exchange, identity communication, and establishment and internalization of cultural norms. We also show the importance of having celebrities among fans in order to foster social interactions and legitimate social practices on brand pages.
Despite their popularity and normalization, the public image of conspiracy theory remains morally tainted. Academics contribute by conceiving of conspiracy theorists as a coherent collective: internal variety is sacrificed for a clear external demarcation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands, we explore variation in the conspiracy milieu through people’s own self-understanding. More particularly, we study how these people identify with and distinguish themselves from others. The analysis shows that they actively resist their stigmatization as ‘conspiracy theorists’ by distinguishing themselves from the mainstream as ‘critical freethinkers’. The trope ‘I am not a conspiracy theorist’ is used to reclaim rationality by labelling others within the conspiracy milieu the ‘real’ conspiracy theorists. Secondly, their ideas of self and other make three groups apparent: ‘activists’, ‘retreaters’ and ‘mediators’. Conspiracy culture, we conclude, is not one monolithic whole, but rather a network of different groups of people, identifying with different worldviews, beliefs, and practices.
Terror attacks force democratic societies to mobilize, reinforce and rethink core values, including media freedom and freedom of speech. The present article analyzes how one traumatic event—the 2011 Oslo terror—challenged editorial practices related to editorial control and open debate in major Norwegian media organizations. Meeting the call for more research on disruptive media events in a hybrid media landscape, it illuminates how professional media balance critical debate with strategies for societal recovery in contemporary post-crisis contexts. Based on in-depth interviews with debate editors, the article documents how terror profoundly challenges editorial practices, routines and norms in media organizations with debates in multiple formats and platforms. In their online comment sections, the media organizations all moved towards a more interventionist policy introducing multiple new control measures. In the traditional op-ed formats, however, they selectively expanded the range of voices and included actors deemed too extreme prior to the attacks. Theoretically the article contributes to the literature on disruptive (key) events, editorial strategies during crisis, editorial control in contemporary media systems and editorial approaches to mediated deviance.
What we call the “partisan connection”—the bridge parties build between the people and the formal polity—entails sympathizing with citizens’ suspicions and fears (though not recklessly stoking them). However, loosening the partisan connection and “speaking truth to conspiracy” is sometimes a moral and political imperative when conspiracy charges come from party leaders’ constituents and fellow partisans. We consider epistemological challenges that make it difficult to assess whether conspiracy claims are warranted, and we consider political challenges to assessing the validity of conspiracy claims that are posed by the secrecy, misleading partial truths, obscurantism, and lying that are endemic to politics. Finally, we propose three standards for responsible party officials to use when judging whether to oppose conspiratorial claims: when they are fueled by hatred of certain groups; when they represent the opposition as treasonous and illegitimate; and when conspiracism extends to authority generally, especially expert authority, thereby undermining the basic work of government decision making.
In the nineteenth century, the largest Jewish community the modern world had known lived in hundreds of towns and shtetls in the territory between the Prussian border of Poland and the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. The period had started with the partition of Poland and the absorption of its territories into the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires; it would end with the first large-scale outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and the imposition in Russia of strong anti-Semitic legislation. In the years between, a traditional society accustomed to an autonomous way of life would be transformed into one much more open to its surrounding cultures, yet much more confident of its own nationalist identity. In The Jews of Eastern Europe, Israel Bartal traces this transformation and finds in it the roots of Jewish modernity.
This article investigates how hybrid regimes supply governance by examining a series of dilemmas (involving elections, the mass media, and state institutions) that their rulers face. The authors demonstrate how regime responses to these dilemmas – typically efforts to maintain control while avoiding outright repression and societal backlash – have negative outcomes, including a weakening of formal institutions, proliferation of “substitutions” (e.g., substitutes for institutions), and increasing centralization and personalization of control. Efforts by Russian leaders to disengage society from the sphere of decision-making entail a significant risk of systemic breakdown in unexpected ways. More specifically, given significantly weakened institutions for interest representation and negotiated compromise, policy-making in the Russian system often amounts to the leadership's best guess (ad hoc manual policy adjustments) as to precisely what society will accept and what it will not, with a significant possibility of miscalculation. Three case studies of the policy-making process are presented: the 2005 cash-for-benefits reform, plans for the development of the Khimki Forest, and changes leading up to and following major public protests in 2011–2012.
As a key feature of the contemporary political landscape, populism stands as one of the most contentious concepts in political science. This article presents a critique of dominant conceptions of populism – as ideology, logic, discourse and strategy/organisation – and introduces the category of ‘political style’ as a new compelling way of thinking about the phenomenon. We argue that this new category captures an important dimension of contemporary populism that is missed by rival approaches. In doing so, we put forward an inductive model of populism as a political style and contextualise it within the increasingly stylised and mediatised milieu of contemporary politics by focusing on its performative features. We conclude by considering how this concept allows us to understand how populism appears across the political spectrum, how it translates into the political mainstream and its implications for democratic politics.
Popular conspiracy theories, like those about JFK, the attacks of 9/11, the death of Princess Diana or the swine flu vaccination, are generally depicted in the social sciences as pathological, irrational and, essentially, anti-modern. In this contribution it is instead argued that conspiracy culture is a radical and generalized manifestation of distrust that is embedded in the cultural logic of modernity and, ultimately, produced by processes of modernization. In particular, epistemological doubts about the validity of scientific knowledge claims, ontological insecurity about rationalized social systems like the state, multinationals and the media; and a relentless ‘will to believe’ in a disenchanted world – already acknowledged by Adorno, Durkheim, Marx and Weber – nowadays motivate a massive turn to conspiracy culture in the West.
Political theorists do not in general pay much attention to populism; are there any good reasons why they should do so? This paper will consider a number of positive answers to this question. Most attention has so far been paid to issues of methodology—can we define ‘populism’? Recently there has also been some interest in the relation between populism and democracy, but there are two further topics that may be worth investigating, first the possibility of a distinctive political ideology that might be called ‘populist’, and second the meanings and significance of populism's core concept, the elusive ‘people’.
This article deals with the rise of prosumer capitalism. Prosumption involves both production and consumption rather than focusing on either one (production) or the other (consumption). It is maintained that earlier forms of capitalism (producer and consumer capitalism) were themselves characterized by prosumption. Given the recent explosion of user-generated content online, we have reason to see prosumption as increasingly central. In prosumer capitalism, control and exploitation take on a different character than in the other forms of capitalism: there is a trend toward unpaid rather than paid labor and toward offering products at no cost, and the system is marked by a new abundance where scarcity once predominated. These trends suggest the possibility of a new, prosumer, capitalism.
We sense a retreat from the genres of "media events" (Dayan and Katz, 1992)--the ceremonial Contests, Conquests and Coronations that punctuated television's first 50 years ---and a corresponding rise in the live broadcasting of disruptive events such as Disaster, Terror and War. We believe that cynicism, disenchantment and segmentation are undermining attention to ceremonial events, while the mobility and ubiquity of television technology, together with the downgrading of scheduled programming, provide ready access to disruption. If ceremonial events may be characterized as "co-productions" of broadcasters and establishments, then disruptive events may be characterized as "co-productions" of broadcasters and anti-establishment agencies, i.e. the perpetrators of disruption. I Media Events, as defined by Dayan and Katz (1992), are public ceremonies, deemed historic, and broadcast live on television. The genre, and its study, owes a lot to Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt. In 1977, Sadat announced that he would personally come to Jerusalem to offer peace in exchange for the territory which Israel had taken from Egypt in the war of 1967. Live television accompanied almost every moment of his three-day visit to Jerusalem, enthralling Israelis as well as Egyptians, attracting the reluctant attention of the other Arab countries, and the fascination of the rest of the world.
The Nature of Conspiracy Theories
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Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture
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Despite Subscription Surges for Largest U.S. Newspapers, Circulation and Revenue Fall for Industry Overall
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