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03 Unit 3: The Politics of Fake News: 03 Unit 3: The Politics of Fake News

03 Unit 3: The Politics of Fake News
03 Unit 3: The Politics of Fake News
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“03 Unit 3: The Politics of Fake News”

MODULE 3, UNIT 3
The Politics of Fake News
What’s behind the rise of fake news in the U.S. and the world

Goal:  Understanding the rise of fake news in the context of modern U.S. and global politics. 

In the previous unit, we explained the history and various types of fake news in the U.S. and other parts of the world. The conditions for the creation and distribution of contemporary disinformation was aided by the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, and smartphones and social media in the first two decades of the 2000s.

But media technology alone doesn’t create an ecosystem of fake news; there has to be a purposeful intention for making and distributing fake news. That’s the “power” part of this handbook’s name: Media and Power.

For as long as there have been human civilizations, there has also been competition for various individuals and groups to gain power. In the last chapter, we noted that ancient Greeks deployed fake news to influence what people thought, and the Federalist Party used fake news in efforts to win the 1800 U.S. election. (They lost.)

For more than 150 years, the United States has had two dominant political parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. And, since the rise of the U.S. penny press in the 1830s, the country’s news media have been mostly commercial, centrist in politics, and independent of political parties (unlike the partisan press of the late 1700s and early 1800s, which was aligned with and often sponsored by political parties).

Yet, in recent decades, concern and charges about “media bias” have become quite common. Below, we investigate popular charts that claim to accurately track and measure media bias. We examine the context of the news media since the 1960s, tracking the development of the mainstream press and the concurrent development of a conservative media in the United States. Our goal is to help you understand the complexities of our media information system and the reliability of the information it creates.

“Media Bias” Charts and What They Get Wrong about Politics and News 


It is difficult to live in a media environment with so much news and information, and with so many allegations of news having a political bias or being fake. A good skill to have in the Information Age–an era that is also becoming the AI Age–is understanding how to evaluate whether information you encounter is reliable.

In recent years, two companies have developed charts to help people find reliable news and determine what they call “media bias.” These charts claim to identify and categorize media organizations according to a continuum of political bias – from the center to degrees of left and right. These charts seem to sum up news media in a tidy visual manner. But, as we will discuss, they are not accurate pictures and omit crucially important elements about the purpose of various media.

The charts are from companies called Ad Fontes Media and AllSides. They are both for-profit corporations with a mission to benefit the public, which includes their school and business clients that pay for their services. Both companies use a methodology of content analysis, conducted by teams of three human raters – each with a left, center, or right political perspective. Both companies also have begun to employ AI to do the work of human raters.

Although both media charts seem to make determining media “bias” visually  understandable, both also fall short in terms of media literacy and understanding what the news media should do.

The Ad Fontes Media’s Interactive Media Bias Chart

Chart with “News Value and Reliability” on the vertical axis, and “Political Bias” on the horizontal axis. Screenshots or logos from various news outlets are placed on the chart where they are deemed to fall on the 2 axes.

Copyright 2025 Ad Fontes Media, Inc. Screenshot used under a Fair Use exemption to U.S. Copyright Law.

The Ad Fontes Media Bias chart is organized with “News Value and Reliability” on the vertical axis, and “Political Bias” on the horizontal axis. You can access it here. Note that the highest rated media organizations (including ABC News, CBS Evening News, the Wall Street Journal, and USAFacts) on news value and reliability are in the center of the political bias axis, whereas the lowest rated organizations are the furthest toward the most extreme left and right positions of that axis.

The AllSides Media Bias Chart

5 vertical columns showing news outlet logos in each, from left to right labeled Left, Lean Left, Center, Lean Right, and Right.

Copyright 2024 AllSides. Screenshot used under a Fair Use exemption to U.S. Copyright Law.

AllSides rates media organizations from left to center to right. You can access this chart here. Note that AllSides does not rate organizations at all in terms of news value or reliability (or “accuracy or credibility,” as it notes).

Remember what we said earlier (Module 3, Unit 1) – “So, if journalists can never be scientifically objective, what is the standard by which we should judge journalism and its accuracy? The answer is verification.” Verification is also what should be our focus in evaluating so-called “media bias” charts.

How does verification relate to bias? A biased news story is one that is unfairly prejudiced for or against something. So, if a news story is making allegations or conclusions without evidence (that’s the unfair part), then one could say it is a biased news story.

But, if a story makes allegations or conclusions that are well verified, then that’s not bias (even though the subject of those allegations or conclusions doesn’t like what the story said). That’s why the best journalism organizations have very high standards of verification, especially for stories that investigate something and have strong conclusions. Good journalists want rock-solid evidence to support their story.

Ad Fontes (which means “to the source” in Latin) includes reliability (its word for verification) as a factor in its algorithm, but the chart’s measures of verification seem to be algorithmically influenced by its coders’ ratings of political bias. For example, media organizations rated as centrist (such as ABC News, CBS Evening News, the Wall Street Journal, and USAFacts) generally have the highest reliability in the Ad Fontes system. That means the raters didn’t think their stories leaned politically left or right.  

Yet, it is possible for a news report to have completely verified facts and still be perceived by raters as politically biased. For example, imagine a politician (of any political party) who is convicted of corruption. The report can be entirely accurate and verified, but will also contain plenty of statements about that politician’s lies and criminal activity that may be coded negatively as “biased.” Or, imagine an analysis or opinion piece for or against something that is well-documented and also considers counter-arguments. Just because a report has analysis or an opinion should not automatically make it biased, but opinion and analysis are counted as politically biased in this chart’s methodology (see its vertical axis on the left side).

The other popular chart, by AllSides, does not account for verification at all. Its approach is to give its customers stories on a given issue from media organizations it deems center, right, and left. Its expressed mission is to “expose people to information and ideas from all sides of the political spectrum so they can better understand the world.” Yet, its readers are on their own: There is no direction on how to determine what’s reliable and true, and no determination that any of the articles may be flat-out wrong or misleading.

Yet, there is an attraction to rating media as left, center, and right. It seems to suggest a political equivalence – “see, the media are biased on the left and the right,” someone might say, concluding that hardly any of the media can be believed. It’s a simple way to sidestep the hard work of having to evaluate media organizations on the veracity or truthfulness of their news reports.

Although this “both-sidesism” seems fair, in fact it can create false equivalence – giving equal weight to opposing sides on an issue (or to two seemingly opposing media organizations) without rigorously vetting the merits of each.

AllSides does this by giving its clients “all sides” of a story (actually, from what it determines as three political viewpoints: center, left, and right), suggesting – with no verification –  that all are equally valuable news stories. This “all sides are ok” approach is a clever way of selling subscriptions to schools and businesses, since it accepts all media organizations without consideration of their commitment to journalistic principles like verification. This is a politically useful approach, but one that overlooks real differences in media organizations.

ACTIVITY

Media Bias Charts
As a class exercise, divide into groups and spend 5-10 minutes analyzing the two media bias charts. Do you notice any patterns, or possible instances of false equivalence? What do the charts seem to be saying about U.S. news media?

Understanding Media Bias – A Better Approach

What would a chart of media bias look like using verification as the main dimension? It would evaluate each news organization (or individual story) by the quality of the evidence used to support its conclusions. Can the conclusions be verified? Or are the claims mere assertion with no data to support them? Political philosophies alone shouldn’t be an automatic disqualification – every news organization has a centrist, left, or right perspective. The determining factor for bias should be the veracity of that news organization’s work. Thus, a media organization that serves political purposes above the public interest, doesn’t do comprehensive original reporting, and seeks to deceive its audience or market unverified assertions to them would have a problem of bias.

The most reliable journalism would emerge from media organizations that a) practice  journalism of verification, b) have a commitment to publishing and posting stories that hold up to professional journalism standards, and c) serve the public interest. In the next unit (Unit 4), “Identifying and Analyzing Fake News,” we will go through, step-by-step, this better way to evaluate the veracity of news stories, images, and video.


The Growing Problem of Media Bias and Disinformation

The problem of bias and disinformation is expanding. By the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the New York Times reported that disinformation researchers told them the growing flow of disinformation had become a “torrent of half-truths, lies and fabrications, both foreign and homegrown, [that] has exceeded anything that came before.”[1] People now live in an information age, but not all the information is verified. Learning to distinguish between good information and false information is an essential skill.

In the modern United States, the unprecedented flood of fake news was enabled by the intersection of technical and political influences. Technical capabilities like AI help produce media messages that appear to be legitimate news, and make it harder for people to distinguish real from fake news, especially when they appear on the same platforms (such as social media) that carry genuine stories. Additionally, research has demonstrated that the speed of circulation of information in digital spaces makes it easier for fake news to gain traction and convince people it is real, as we noted earlier in this handbook.

There are other factors at play in the rise of fake news and disinformation. In the United States, a large number of legacy mainstream media organizations are nonpartisan, i.e., they don’t work for or with political parties. In most cases, this would be your local newspaper, TV and radio stations, local and regional digital news organizations, national newspapers, network TV news, cable news, and additional digital news organizations, including web pages, podcasts, and social media platforms. There is also a conservative media in the U.S., one that is much stronger and better organized than any counterpart media on the political left. We’ll outline the particular histories of the U.S. media beginning around the 1960s, when they started to take new paths.

How Independent News Media Distanced Itself from Most Americans

 

Beginning in the 1960s, the independent mainstream media began to transform itself into what it believed was a sound business model for the future.[2] The United States newspaper industry has always been in flux, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a long list of newspaper groups became publicly listed on stock exchanges, including the Times Mirror Co. and Thomson Newspapers in 1965; Gannett in 1967, the New York Times in 1968, and the Knight and Ridder groups in 1969 (they merged in 1974). Consolidation also changed the newspaper business, with chains controlling 46% of the circulation in 1960, and growing to hold 81% of the circulation by 1990. Small, independent news outlets, committed to the public good of their local communities, are increasingly rare.

 

Because being publicly owned encouraged growth and consolidation, newspapers became more profit driven and market focused. This created a pressure for news outlets to focus on upscale consumers and cut costs by retreating from both urban and rural delivery. The new target audience wasn’t a “mass” audience (despite the fact that readers with low education levels read newspapers at rates near those of college graduates), but instead a “class” audience – one that newspapers believed would be more desirable to advertisers because they had more disposable income to spend. Newspapers shifted from a business model that focused on subscriptions bolstered by providing news to their readers to a business model that focused on selling audiences to advertisers.

 

As news outlets imagined their ideal readers as middle to upper-class white-collar workers, elements of news content in newspapers changed. The labor beat declined and was replaced by “workplace” columns covering issues like business office culture, getting along with bosses, and workplace romances. Personal finance journalism flourished, as newspapers appealed to readers with investments to look after. All of this had the effect of refocusing newspapers on a different audience. According to the Newspaper Association of America, in 1967 high school graduates had an 80.0% average weekly newspaper readership, while college graduates were at 85.4%. By 1987 the gap had widened significantly – even as overall readership declined – with high school graduates at a 63.6% average weekly readership and college graduates at 77.7%.[3] 

 

In short, the large newspaper groups cut the working class readers–which constitute up to 60% of the U.S. labor force–adrift.[4] The news media were not speaking to them as an audience. (The same could be said for network TV news media of the era, which also targeted a middle-class audience.) That approach is still evident. If one looks today at the media kit or audience profile for almost any independent news organization (e.g., metro and national newspapers, network television news, cable news, news radio, and their digital sites) they will find news organizations boasting to potential advertisers about their audience’s percentage of households with 100K+ income, college degrees, and propensity to have interest in financial services, travel, or digital technology. That’s the upscale audience that is prized by most independent news media and their advertisers or sponsors.

In pursuit of their profit-making mission, the independent news media lost sight of their democratic mission (news for all citizens, not just good consumers), and slowly lost their working-class audience – just as the conservative media was on the rise and looking to expand its audience. To be clear, the conservative media were interested in recruiting a mostly white working class audience. Black audiences largely were forsaken by both the conservative media and mainstream independent media, which is why Black newspapers and media continued to flourish in the United States for so long.[5] So, we can conclude there has been a bias in much of the mainstream news media – not a political bias, but very much a class bias – that influenced what was covered and for whom it was covered. But, that class bias slowly got translated into a political bias.

The rise of conservative media happened at the same time that independent media in the United States decided to refocus from a mass audience to a more upscale, “elite” audience. This enabled the Republican Party and partisan conservative media to label the independent press as “elite.” And it was not just a label – there was truth to the fact that the mainstream media was interested in a different audience, a point that the Republican Party was able to use to its advantage as Richard Nixon did in the late 1960s and early 1970s. To summarize, this didn’t automatically mean that the mainstream media had a liberal bias. In fact, as the mainstream media focused more on upper middle class issues, it de-emphasized left-leaning economic news about working class people and labor unions, for example, and instead focused on new issues like consumer and personal finance news (like how to invest in the stock market).

You might begin to see an inversion of how the two U.S. political parties portray themselves. The Democratic Party, which was long known as the party for working class people, focused more on higher education, suburban citizens, and business. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, which was historically known as the party for the wealthy, began to take on a reputation in the last 50 years under presidents like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, as a more working-class party (while also keeping its alliance with big business). Keep in mind that these labels are not entirely accurate (the politics are more complicated, and vary across the geography of the U.S.), but there have been some shifts in how people vote and think about these two parties over time, and the messages and marketing of news media, as we will see, have some effect on that.

As the mainstream media began to make this shift in target audience in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a concurrent move by conservatives to make a different kind of media – one that was explicitly conservative – and to woo disenfranchised working class members to the conservative media and its partisan messaging.

The Rise of Conservative Media in the U.S. (the First Wave)

The formation of a conservative media began in a small first wave in the 1940s and 1950s, with conservative magazines like the National Review, publishing houses, and a few television and radio programs. This became the foundation of a political movement that was still on the margins of Republican politics.[6] 

Vice President Spiro Agnew (left) and President Richard Nixon. Now More Than Ever. [1972] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2016651715/. No known restrictions on publication, per Library of Congress information about the Yanker Poster Collection.

 

The desire of many Republican political figures to develop a conservative media system that operated to serve Republican goals and counter the mainstream news media was strong. Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate who lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, and who famously did not look as healthy and robust as Kennedy in the televised debates, came back later in the decade with a new media strategy. Nixon was able to win big in 1968 with an approach that helped him control the media narrative by harnessing the power of television (with his television producer Roger Ailes, who would later become the founding CEO of Fox News) through televised events like live town hall appearances, and by casting the mainstream news media as the enemy.

Historian Rick Perlstein noted Nixon’s growing “obsessive” hatred of the press.[7] Yet, the press treated Nixon well by many measures. For example, he received support from 78% of newspapers endorsing candidates in the 1960 election (the one he lost), 80% in 1968, and 93% in 1972.[8] But, Nixon could not let go of his grievances against the news media. In December 1972, he told his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, “Never forget, the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy…write that on the blackboard 100 times.”[9] 

Nixon disliked the press’s questions and demands for accountability in its reporting. He lashed out at them in a multitude of ways: He banned a reporter from the Los Angeles Times from White House press briefings; he had the FBI investigate other reporters to find information to use against them; he threatened the Washington Post with an investigation from the Department of Justice’s antitrust division; and he used the Federal Communications Commission to threaten taking away broadcast licenses from TV networks ABC, NBC, and CBS. Nixon also had his vice president, Spiro Agnew, make speeches ripping into the news media, including one 1969 address where he famously denounced them as “hostile critics” and a “tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one.”[10] Nixon didn’t want the news media reporting any narrative framing except his, and when they didn’t, he could be furious.

In 1973, President Richard Nixon’s speechwriter and political strategist Patrick Buchanan cited the idea of conservative cable television as a solution to his perceived “liberal bias” of the mainstream news media.[11] He wrote: “Dr. Milton Friedman, distinguished economist and disciple of Adam Smith, believes the long-range answer lies in more and competing channels of communication, to be achieved partly through the rapid expansion of cable television. But that is a long-range solution.”[12]

Maligning independent media as “Liberal Media”?

Before we further chart the rise of the conservative media, it’s necessary to address the idea of liberal bias in the mainstream media. Starting in the 1950s, particularly with the establishment of the conservative magazine National Review in 1955, there was a concerted effort in conservative circles to cultivate mistrust of the independent mainstream media and label it as “liberal” media. According to media historian Julie B. Lane, this helped to “turn conservatives away from mainstream media and toward National Review and like-minded outlets” and helped to “pave the way for the development of a conservative mediasphere that has grown into a major force in the American political culture of the twenty-first century.”[13] In other words, calling mainstream media ”liberal” was not an objective description, but a strategic framing.

Lane explained that there were three ways conservatives extended this criticism: “It set up liberalism as the enemy of all conservatives; it claimed that individual media outlets did not simply tilt to the left on some issues, but worked together to demand conformity with the entire liberal agenda; and it declared the media belonged to a smug, elite liberal Establishment.”[14] This characterization was not accurate – remember the statistics on media endorsements of Nixon as just one piece of contrary evidence.

The Nixon administration regularly voiced complaints about liberal media bias, but the sentiment didn’t become more widespread among Americans in general until the 1990s, when there was a larger conservative media structure to disseminate that point of view. For example, in 1988, poll data found only 12% of Americans said the mainstream news media had a liberal bias in presidential election coverage. That sentiment grew to more than 40% by 1996. Note: it was not that the nature of coverage changed; perception of the coverage changed. (Similarly, data from the New York Times illustrates the term “liberal bias” beginning to appear more frequently in its pages during the Nixon era, then quadrupling in use in the Times by the 1990s.)[15]

Rising complaints about liberal bias in the late 1980s and 1990s focused particularly on allegations of bias against the Republican presidential candidates in 1988, 1992, and 1996. Media researchers investigated the increase in claims of liberal bias in the mainstream media through a groundbreaking study in 1999 that analyzed news coverage of those three presidential campaign seasons.[16] They looked at two things: news coverage of the principal candidates of those three elections, and news coverage of media bias allegations during those same periods. What they found was that the candidates received relatively the same treatment from the news media. In other words, there was no substantive bias against candidates on the left or right from the mainstream media. Instead, they found a rising number of claims of liberal bias from conservative candidates, party officials, and supporters, growing fourfold from 1988 to 1996 and levied at all mainstream (independent)  media. Actual bias did not increase. Claims of bias did.

The study called these accusations of bias “elite cues” (i.e., public statements and actions) from conservative political elites, and found that they were the “predominant source of claims of liberal bias” and the “substantial influence behind the rising public perception of liberal media bias.”[17] The researchers added that “this process seems particularly likely to take place if the elites quoted in the news content are considered trustworthy sources by at least portions of the citizenry.”[18] They also accurately predicted that “these criticisms may now be a staple of rhetoric in presidential campaigns, particularly among members or supporters of the Republican Party.”[19] A more recent study from 2020 had similar conclusions about the influence of elite cues using the term “fake news” in the same manner as “liberal bias” to “discredit the mainstream media.”[20] Basically, news stories’ criticism of candidates or any reporting that was not uniformly positive was taken as evidence of bias – not as evidence that media were fulfilling the public duty of reporting on the many sides of political issues.

One of the largest studies of media bias is a meta-analysis of 59 quantitative studies from 1949 to 1997. It examined partisan media bias in U.S. presidential campaigns, particularly “gatekeeping bias, which is the preference for selecting stories from one party or the other; coverage bias, which considers the relative amounts of coverage each party receives; and statement bias, which focuses on the favorability of coverage toward one party or the other.” The meta-analysis found no significant biases in newspapers and newsmagazines, and “small, measurable, but probably insubstantial coverage and statement biases” in network television news.[21] So, you may have heard many claims that mainstream media are biased against a political party. We encourage you to verify that claim. Ask: what data does the person making that claim have to back it up? Can they verify or prove the claim? Our point is that claims of mainstream media bias are not verified. In fact, the studies we cite provide ample evidence that mainstream media are not biased against one party.

The real liberal media

In the U.S., there is a politically and unabashedly liberal media that is different from the centrist mainstream media, and includes news publications like Mother Jones, The Nation, In These Times, the television news program Democracy Now! and the podcast Pod Save America. Media historian Eric Alterman said the liberal media “is tiny and profoundly underfunded compared to its conservative counterpart, but it does exist.”[22] 

Some very real biases

Political scientist Anthony Dimaggio notes that there are some documented biases in mainstream news coverage, but they tend not to be partisan in nature. For example, in covering national domestic and foreign policy issues, the news often has “official source” bias – their stories “amplify official voices, and the nature of that amplification depends on which party controls the government. When Republicans control Congress and the White House, journalists heavily favor Republican sources. When Democrats hold Congress and the White House, reporting favors them. And when control of the government is divided, coverage focuses on both parties.”[23] The official voices from political parties dominate the news, while nonofficial sources like citizen groups, lobbying firms, and scholars are less likely to be cited.

Dimaggio also identifies “a pro-business, or ‘hegemonic,’ media bias.”[24] Mainstream news media, which are usually advertising-supported capitalist enterprises themselves, tend to favor market-oriented solutions, target more upscale audiences, and rarely cover labor unions, the working class, and people in poverty.[25] The most striking example of this bias may be found in the 2025 announcement that the Washington Post opinion section will now focus on “personal liberties and free markets.”[26] This hegemonic pro-business and pro-capitalism bias isn’t necessarily a partisan position, since both major political parties in the U.S. support that perspective, but it could be viewed as somewhat partisan, as the Democratic Party has historically advocated for labor unions and people in poverty more than the Republican Party.

Conservative Media Consolidates After Nixon (the Second Wave)

In the 1970s, conservatives in the United States began to more fully realize their dreams of a conservative media system. Look for the bolded terms below to see the network take shape.

This larger second wave of right-wing media network-building — constructed in the same space as traditional news media — got its start in 1976 with Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the New York Post, a leading newspaper in New York City, the American information capital. As he had already begun doing with his media properties in Britain and Australia, Murdoch, who was Australian, and became a U.S. citizen in 1985, used the Post to play political kingmaker and boost his favored conservative politicians across the English-speaking world, including long-time British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.[27] 

 

The rising evangelical movement of the 1970s further advanced conservative media in 1977 with the founding of CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network. The cable channel and its flagship program, “The 700 Club,” vigorously merged religious topics and conservative politics. CBN founder Pat Robertson became a 1988 Republican presidential candidate himself.

 

In the late 1980s, conservative media became even more powerful with the launch of nationwide conservative talk radio. This was previously impossible because the Federal Communications Commission had enforced a policy called the Fairness Doctrine since 1949, which allowed stations to editorialize, but only if they also provided similar opportunities for “contrasting viewpoints.” President Reagan’s FCC dropped the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and talk radio quickly swung from the middle to the right. Nearly all of the top talk radio personalities in the U.S. today are conservatives.[28] 


Rush Limbaugh, the biggest star of talk radio until his death in 2021, was the first conservative personality to go national on the ABC Radio Network in 1988. Limbaugh’s persistent attacks on the Clinton administration and his support of conservative causes helped Republicans gain control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994. The victorious freshman House members celebrated Limbaugh as an “
honorary member of their class.”

 

The highest profile organization in the right-wing media, and a realization of conservative hopes since the 1970s, is Fox News, the cable network founded by Rupert Murdoch in 1996 and run by Roger Ailes until his resignation in 2016. Ailes was a former Republican media operative who got his start with Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign. Murdoch again got to play Republican Party power broker, and maintained a revolving door of GOP politicians as commentators and hosts.[29] Fox News has also been enormously profitable, with greater emphasis on talk and opinion shows, less emphasis on costly original reporting, and a dedicated conservative audience.[30] The revolving door at Fox News also led to multiple Fox News veterans staffing Trump’s second administration, with at least 21 Fox News hosts and contributors recruited by Trump.[31] 

Local TV news in many markets around the U.S. also shifted to the right, especially with the the rightward shift of Sinclair Broadcasting, the second-largest local TV station owner in the U.S., with 185 stations in 86 markets, covering about 40 percent of U.S. households. Studies have documented how Sinclair’s owners have nationalized portions of their stations’ local TV news content with centralized content, including features from conservative, pro-Republican pundits.[32]

 

Since the 1990s, and into the 2000s, the Internet has provided a grassroots system for the conservative media, acting as “opinion entrepreneurs” –  individuals and groups who inject their views (often disinformation and conspiracy theories) into the network of conservative media organizations, with the hope of channeling the stories into the national conservative media agenda, and – even better – into the national independent mainstream news agenda. [See Unit 2: The History of Fake News.] Matt Drudge, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Joe Rogan, and X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk are among the opinion entrepreneurs in the conservative media. Musk is a particularly powerful opinion entrepreneur as the world’s richest man, one of Donald Trump’s closest allies and a powerful administration official in Trump’s second term, and the owner of X (formerly Twitter), which he purchased in 2022 for $44 billion. Musk regularly uses the site to spread disinformation. Rogan is influential as well, as the highest-paid and top-rated podcaster on Spotify and elsewhere, and as a media figure prone to sharing disinformation. Rogan, who said Trump was not welcome on his show in 2022, endorsed Trump for president in 2024.

As noted above, significant portions of social media and podcasting serve partisan agendas. Donald Trump, who has his own social media platform, Truth Social and a popular X channel, also operates as an opinion entrepreneur in his times as both citizen and president, floating ideas to see if they gain traction in the broader conservative and independent media.

Thus, across several media – newspapers, unregulated talk radio, cable television, local news, the Web, social media, and podcasting – conservatives have established a significant foothold, creating their own messaging “echo chamber” (as each site refers or links to other conservative media to simulate the act of verification), and also reaching larger and larger audiences.

 

Conservative media appropriates much of the look and sound of the mainstream news media (and may also make marketing claims of being “fair and balanced,” as Fox News once did), but it disregards many of the essential elements of journalism, including the obligation to truth, the loyalty to all citizens, the commitment to verification, independence from those they cover, and serving as a watchdog over power.

​​Case Study: How Disinformation Goes from Rumor to Prime Time 

NBC called it one of the most “extraordinary” moments of a presidential debate, when candidate and former president Donald Trump “repeated a baseless and sensationalist claim about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating dogs and other pets.”[33]

In the September 10, 2024 debate with candidate and vice president Kamala Harris, Trump responded to a question about immigration, and claimed “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating – they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”[34]

David Muir, the ABC anchor who was a debate moderator, immediately fact-checked the allegation: “I just want to clarify here. You bring up Springfield, Ohio. ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”[35] Still, Trump insisted that people on television were saying this.

How does a completely false allegation become part of a presidential debate? According to the Wall Street Journal, the false rumor began a month before the debate.

On August 10, Blood Tribe “a group wearing ski masks and carrying swastika flags and rifles marched in Springfield.” They were soon joined by the Proud Boys. According to the Wall Street Journal, these “outside neo-Nazi groups -- which specialize in exploiting local controversy to foment outrage about migrants -- had seized on a local controversy and fanned the narrative of pet-eating Haitians” in Springfield, Ohio, a working-class town that had a growing population of refugees from Haiti.[36] Neo-Nazi groups began the rumor.

On September 5, 2024, that anti-immigrant sentiment found its way into a Springfield resident’s post in a private Facebook group called “Springfield Ohio Crime and Information.” Erika Lee, 35, a hardware store worker who had lived in Springfield for four years, posted this.[37] 

Screenshot of social media post that alleges a neighbor's cat was eaten by Haitian community members.

The original Facebook post by Erika Lee in a private group called “Springfield Ohio Crime and Information.”

According to an investigation by the fact-check organization NewsGuard, Lee heard the rumor from a neighbor, Kimberly Newton, who heard it from her friend, who heard it from the alleged cat owner. “The interviews reveal just how flimsy and unsubstantiated the rumor was from the beginning — based entirely on third hand hearsay,” NewsGuard reported.[38] The only information provided to verify the claim that an immigrant had killed a cat was one person’s claim about what a neighbor claimed that their daughter’s friend had said. And, the original poster eventually deleted the post, given it was just a rumor she had heard from an acquaintance.[39] But the damage had been done as the post circulated, recirculated, and was amplified by public figures.

On September 6, Lee’s private Facebook group post was re-posted on a “conservative account on X with over 2.9 million users.”[40] 

On September 8, conservative political talk show host Charlie Kirk reposted a screen grab of Lee’s original post and said that “residents of Springfield, OH are reporting that Haitians are eating their family pets.” Note the language of “reporting,” making this sound like a journalistic story. Note, also, one person’s unverified X post claiming one cat had been killed became plural residents claiming multiple family pets had been killed and eaten. Within 24 hours, it had received 3 million views.[41]

On September 9, J.D. Vance, then one of Ohio’s U.S. senators, and the vice-presidential nominee running mate of Trump, recirculated the rumor, posting “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country.”Note the language of “reports,” implying reporting with verification. Also note it is multiple reports and multiple pets. And, verification should have played a role; before posting information, public figures should seek to verify the information they are circulating is accurate given people are likely to assume that a statement by a member of the government is official, meaning accurate and verified. Instead, verification was only sought after the post.

A post on the platform X by JD Vance, sharing about reports of pets being adbuted and eaten by "people who shouldn't be in this country".

J.D. Vance’s September 9, 2024 post on X, the day before candidate Donald Trump alleged in a televised debate that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. https://x.com/JDVance/status/1833148904864465117

Also on the morning of September 9, Springfield’s city manager “fielded an unusual question” from a staff member of Vance.[42] According to the Wall Street Journal, “the staffer called to ask if there was any truth to bizarre rumors about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield.” The city manager said he responded “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”[43] But, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “By then, Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.” Even after it was clear there was no verification of this claim, and that in fact it was likely false, Vance did not retract or correct the post.

In response to the recirculating posts, professional journalists sought to verify the story. ABC news, for example, reached out to the city of Springfield. There was no verification, with the city’s statement to ABC news declaring "there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”[44] Springfield Police informed news outlets seeking to verify the story that, “In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”[45] Despite city officials and law enforcement saying there was NO credible evidence that pets had been killed by immigrants, the claim continued to circulate.

On September 9, even after the city had said this was a false story, Elon Musk posted an AI-generated cat and a duck meme with the caption, "save them!" This post, as of April 23, 2025, had 95.8 million views. According to the British newspaper The Independent, “Other Republicans, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, shared similar posts including a photo of two kittens overlaid with: ‘Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.’”[46] 

On September 10, after his own staffer had failed to get verification of the story and Springfield city officials and police had made clear there were no credible reports, Vance posted “In the last several weeks, my office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who’ve said their neighbors’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” When the original story could not be verified, Vance then circulated additional unverified inquiries instead of the reports of the Springfield officials. Again, no first hand-reports were cited; only rumors. And, even knowing the original post was unverified, Vance encouraged people to "keep the cat memes flowing.”[47]

The cat memes did keep flowing. The Arizona Republican Party erected “EAT LESS KITTENS — vote Republican!” billboards in Phoenix, Arizona, and while traveling to the upcoming presidential debate, Trump posted AI-generated images and memes referencing the unsubstantiated claim of pets being eaten by immigrants.[48]

And then Trump repeated the debunked rumor in a nationally televised presidential debate. During the debate, he proclaimed: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating – they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Immediately, one of the debate moderators, journalist David Muir, indicated ABC had sought verification of the story. Here is the exchange:

Muir: “I just want to clarify here. You bring up Springfield, Ohio. ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

Trump: “Well, I’ve seen people on television. The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager.”

Muir: “I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking this from the city manager.”

Trump: “People are on television saying the dog was eaten by the people that went there,” Trump said.

Muir: “Again, the Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.”[49]

Muir and ABC news did the work of verification and pointed out when Trump’s claims were unverified and false. This is not bias, but the hallmark of good reporting: to verify. The exchange also illustrates how false stories can gain traction as they recirculate. One false post, inspired by a neo-Nazi group’s rumor, circulated and recirculated across conservative social media and as it circulated, it gained believability (even though it was false). The rumor then was recirculated by government officials, adding to its believability. As the rumor recirculated, it also transformed from one person’s third-hand story of one cat’s killing to claims of multiple second hand stories that “reported” cats, dogs, ducks, and geese had been killed. One person’s claim about one cat transformed into multiple claims of many people eating multiple dogs.

On the morning after the debate, Trump called live into Fox & Friends and labeled ABC News “the most dishonest news organization” and suggested the network be punished for fact-checking him.[50] As we noted earlier, politicians often claim bias when they do not like what media report. In this case, media accurately reported there were no credible reports of immigrants killing pets. Trump had spread a falsehood and was corrected for doing so. This is not bias. That is the job of journalism. Despite this, Trump and Vance continued to defend the untrue allegations and make new ones.[51] 

In the days after the debate, Bill Adair, a Duke University professor and founder of the fact-checking organization PolitiFact, said "It is depressing as a fact checker." He added, "lying is really an economy. Politicians lie because they think it pays off."[52] And, those lies have real consequences for real people. In just the six days after the debate, Springfield experienced at least 33 bomb threats, targeting schools and public buildings. Although they all turned out to be hoaxes, they still resulted in school evacuations, colleges cancelling sporting events, and constant police sweeps with bomb-sniffing dogs.

In response, government officials sought to respond to the falsehoods about Springfield’s residents. Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, defended the Haitian immigrants who were legally permitted to live and work in Springfield, saying: "Following what the mayor has said, what the city manager has said and what the chief of police has said is: We have no evidence that anyone is eating someone's pets in Springfield, Ohio.”[53]

This story illustrates why we are concerned about the future of a public informed by the press. The problem is that people in the United States are often in completely different informational spheres with different codes of conduct and purposes. If you only received your news from conservative commentators on X who engaged in no verification of stories they recirculated, then you likely believed pets were being eaten in Springfield. If you instead listened to ABC or NBC, or read the Wall Street Journal –  all outlets that employ the practice of verification – then you knew the claim that pets were being eaten was false.

The rise of a conservative media network has shaped the news media environment of the United States today: The Republican Party has a partisan media system with the power and the focus to deploy disinformation for political purposes. The Democratic Party has never built a similar network of liberal or progressive news media that coordinates with its political objectives. The situation is one of “asymmetrical polarization,” scholars explain, where consumers of mainstream media get a wider range of viewpoints, and where consumers in the conservative media countersphere get “selective exposure to right-wing political views” and are “less likely to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.”[54]

In sum, the business and cultural standing of United States news media – historically serving as “the Fourth Estate” watchdog in American life – have been sharply damaged over the past 50 years or more. The legacy mainstream news media remain politically independent and committed to the ideals of verified journalism and range of viewpoints, but their audience has significantly eroded. Additionally, the United States mainstream news media have moved from being one of the most trusted institutions in the country in the mid-20th century to being, after decades of coordinated, partisan criticism, one of the least trusted institutions today.[55] 

ACTIVITY

  1. Debate this question: Conservatives have built a successful conservative media system that delivers partisan news. Should liberals/progressives build a similar partisan media system that just serves Democratic Party interests? How would this help or hurt society? What role would independent, nonpartisan media have in such an environment?

The Politics of Fake News Internationally

We’ve discussed the politics of fake news mostly from a U.S. perspective. But, as we have noted earlier, fake news is interlinked with politics around the world, historically and today. The connections of the internet globally, and the ubiquity of digital and AI tools have aided the proliferation of fake news.

As the New York Times noted in 2017, calling legitimate news reports “fake news” had by that time already become a “cudgel for strongmen” and “a tool for attacking their critics and, in some cases, deliberately undermining the institutions of democracy.”[56] Leaders of Angola, China, Libya, Hungary, Myanmar, India, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Serbia, Somalia, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela are among those who have leveled charges of fake news at critics in recent years. Some countries go even further than calling verified journalism “fake news.”

For example, as it continued its war against Ukraine, Russia in 2022 passed laws that “provided for fines of up to five million rubles (U.S. $48,245) and prison terms of up to 15 years for those convicted of disseminating ‘fake news’ or any information that Russian authorities deemed to be false, on the war-related coverage, posing a serious threat to coverage of the Ukraine crisis.”[57] As the nonprofit, nongovernmental organization Committee to Protect Journalists  explained, many Russian journalists relocated their newsrooms outside of Russia, since truth-telling became a criminal action.

Moreover, a number of opinion entrepreneurs, propagandists, and information anarchists have manufactured various forms of fake news for domestic or international propaganda purposes, making their own local and national media systems and global social media platforms inhospitable places for the truth. In 2024, for example, disinformation actors in the United Kingdom stirred up waves of mob violence in reaction to a mass stabbing. The initial tragedy occurred on July 29, 2024 when a 17-year-old boy fatally stabbed three children and injured 10 other people at a dance studio in Southport, England. The police arrested the suspect but did not release his identity due to rules about underage suspects. Several bad actors exploited the tragedy to circulate disinformation.

“The most prominent disinformation narratives included elements of anti-immigrant/Islamophobia, global conspiracy theories and rhetoric undermining civic integrity,” the nonprofit research group Global Disinformation Index reported.[58] For seven days, riots erupted in dozens of locations in England and Northern Ireland, spurred social media messages from anti-Muslim, anti-immigration and neo-Nazi groups and individuals, who circulated the false information that the stabbing suspect was an Islamic immigrant. More than 100 police were injured by the rioters, and more than 1,000 rioters were arrested and 800 charged with crimes.

Overall, authoritarian leaders are threatening press freedom around the world. Anne Bocandé, RSF editorial director of the international nonprofit Reporters Without Borders/Reporters sans frontières (RSF) lamented the decreasing support governments have for media freedom. “States and other political forces are playing a decreasing role in protecting press freedom. This disempowerment sometimes goes hand in hand with more hostile actions that undermine the role of journalists, or even instrumentalise the media through campaigns of harassment or disinformation. Journalism worthy of that name is, on the contrary, a necessary condition for any democratic system and the exercise of political freedoms,” she reported.[59]

According to media research, the effects of fake news and disinformation depend on the political system of the country. In the U.S., there are only two major political parties, and the media environment is accordingly “highly polarized.”[60] The greatest polarization in media happens in countries with just two major political parties (e.g., the U.S., Australia,  and the U.K.) “and the lowest levels in multi-party political systems with proportional voting” (e.g., Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark, Ireland, Finland, and Sweden).


[1] Stephen Lee Myers, “As Election Looms, Disinformation ‘Has Never Been Worse’,” New York Times, Oct. 23, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/business/media/election-disinformation.html.

[2] Christopher R. Martin (2019).  No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press.

[3] Martin, p. 65-67.

[4] Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

[5] Campbell, R., Martin, C.R., Fabos, B., and Becker, R. (2025). Media and Culture: Mass Communication in the Digital Age, 14th Edition (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, pp. 243-244.

[6] Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60 (Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

[7] Joe McGiniss, The Selling of the President 1968 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969);  Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008) 427.

[8] Richard Harris, “The Presidency and the Press,” September 24, 1974, The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1973/10/01/the-presidency-and-the-press.

[9] Matt Giles, “When Richard Nixon Declared War on the Media,” Longreads, November 8, 2018, https://longreads.com/2018/11/08/when-richard-nixon-declared-war-on-the-media/.

[10] Perlstein, 438-439. Also see Charles Holden, “Fifty years ago — Spiro Agnew and the 'Des Moines' speech,” Des Moines Register, November 10, 2019, https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2019/11/10/fifty-years-ago-spiro-agnew-and-des-moines-speech/4166207002/.

[11] Patrick Buchanan later became White House communications director for President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s and a candidate for president in 1992, 1996, and 2000.

[12] Patrick J. Buchanan, The New Majority (Philadelphia: Girard Bank, 1973) 21-22.

[13] Julie B. Lane, “Cultivating Distrust of the Mainstream Media,” in Anthony Nadler and A. J. Bauer, eds, News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) 157.

[14] Lane, 161.

[15] Mark Major, “Bridging the Marginal and the Mainstream,” in Anthony Nadler and A. J. Bauer, eds, News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) 226.

[16] Mark Watts, David Domke, Dhavan V. Shaw, David P. Fan, “Elite Cues and Media Bias in Presidential Campaigns: Explaining Public Perceptions of a Liberal Press,” Communication Research, 26(2), 144-175.

[17] Watts, et al., 165-166. Another study in 1999 found no evidence of bias in media coverage of Republican and Democratic governors of Florida over a 20-year period. See David Niven, “Partisan Bias in the Media? A New Test*,” Social Science Quarterly, 80(4), 1999, 847-857.

[18] Watts, et al., 167.

[19] Watts, et al., 168.

[20] Sander van der Linden, Costas Panagopoulos, Jon Roozenbeek, “You are fake news: Political bias in perceptions of fake news,” Media, Culture & Society, 42(3), 467.

[21] Dave D’Alessio and Mike Allen, “Media Bias in Presidential Elections: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Communication, Volume 50, Issue 4, December 2000, Pages 133–156, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2000.tb02866.x

[22] Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? (New York: Basic Books, 2003) 8.

[23] Anthony Dimaggio, “Slanting the News: Media Bias and Its Effects,” in Anthony Nadler and A. J. Bauer, eds, News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) 1901-192.

[24] Dimaggio, 192.

[25] See Christopher R. Martin, No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019). Also see Christopher R. Martin, “Representations of the Working Poor,” in Sandra L. Borden (ed.) Routledge Companion to Media and Poverty (London: Routledge, 2021) 244-254.

[26] Benjamin Mullin, “Bezos Orders Washington Post Opinion Section to Embrace ‘Personal Liberties and Free Markets’,” New York Times, February 26, 2025,

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/business/media/washington-post-bezos-shipley.html.

[27] Dan Sabbagh, “Power and scandal: how Murdoch drove the UK, US and Australia to the right,” The Guardian, September 21, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/sep/21/power-and-scandal-how-murdoch-drove-the-uk-us-and-australia-to-the-right. On more rare occasions, Murdoch backed candidates who weren’t conservatives, such as the centrist Labour candidate Tony Blair, who served as the UK’s prime minister from 1997 to 2007.

[28] See “Top Talk Audiences,” Talkers, 2024, https://talkers.com/top-talk-audiences/.

[29] Sabbagh, 2023. Also see J. Edward Moreno, “How Rupert Murdoch Built His Media Empire,” New York Times, September 21, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/business/rupert-murdoch-media-empire.html.

[30] Andy Meek, “As Fox News Turns 25, Here’s How Its Business Stacks Up Against Rivals CNN And MSNBC,” Forbes, October 12, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/andymeek/2021/10/12/as-fox-news-turns-25-heres-how-its-business-stacks-up-against-rivals-cnn-and-msnbc/.

[31] Raquel “Rocky” Harris, “All 21 Fox News Personalities, Contributors Who Have Joined the 2nd Trump Administration,” The Wrap, Yahoo!News, February 24, 2025, https://www.yahoo.com/news/21-fox-news-personalities-contributors-221718333.html

[32] Levendusky, M. S. (2021). How Does Local TV News Change Viewers’ Attitudes? The Case of Sinclair Broadcasting. Political Communication, 39(1), 23–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2021.1901807

[33] Daniel Arkin and David Ingram, “Trump pushes baseless claim about immigrants 'eating the pets',” NBC News, September 10, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-pushes-baseless-claim-immigrants-eating-pets-rcna170537.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Kris Maher, Valerie Bauerlein, and Tawnell D. Hobbs, “How the Trump Campaign Ran With Rumors About Pet-Eating Migrants—After Being Told They Weren’t True,” Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2024, https://www.wsj.com/us-news/springfield-ohio-pet-eating-claims-haitian-migrants-04598d48

[37] Sam Howard and Jack Brewster, “Triple Hearsay: Original Sources of the Claim that Haitians Eat Pets in Ohio Admit No First-Hand Knowledge,” NewsGuard’s Reality Check, September 12, 2024, https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/origins-haitians-eating-pets-claim.

[38] Ibid.

[39] James Morley III, “Springfield Resident Regrets Igniting Pet-Eating Rumors,” Newsmax, September 14, 2024, https://www.newsmax.com/politics/springfield-ohio-haitian/2024/09/14/id/1180341/.

[40] Emily Chang, “Timeline of unsubstantiated claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio,” ABC News, September 13, 2024,

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/timeline-unsubstantiated-claims-haitian-immigrants-ohio/story?id=113641302.

[41] David Ingram, “Ohio police have 'no credible reports' of Haitian immigrants harming pets, contradicting JD Vance's claim,” NBC News, September 9, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/jd-vance-ohio-police-no-reports-haitian-immigrants-harming-pets-rcna170271.

[42] Maher, Bauerlein, and Hobbs.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Chang, 2024. 

[45] Ingram, 2024.

[46] James Liddell, “Origin of Trump and JD Vance’s lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets revealed,” The Independent, September 13, 2024, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-haitian-eating-pets-immigrants-facebook-source-b2612208.html.

[47] Huo Jingnan and Jasmine Garsd, “JD Vance spreads debunked claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets,” NPR, September 10, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/09/10/nx-s1-5107320/jd-vance-springfield-ohio-haitians-pets.

[48] Chang, 2024.

[49] Hadas Gold, “ABC debate moderators live fact-checked Trump’s false claims from the stage,” CNN, September 11, 2024,

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/11/media/abc-moderators-debate-fact-check-trump-harris-false-claims/index.html.

[50] Mike Snider, “Trump: 'Take away' ABC broadcast license for 'unfair debate' treatment,” USA Today, September 12, 2024, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/09/12/trump-abc-debate-dispute/75196601007/. Also see Bailee Hill, “Trump says ABC debate moderators favored Kamala Harris: 'It was three to one',” Fox News, September 11, 2024, https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-says-abc-debate-moderators-favored-kamala-harris-three-one. Fox’s report did not fact-check Trump’s allegations of pet-eating.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Maher, Bauerlein, and Hobbs.

[53] Phil Helsel, “More than 30 bomb threats made in Springfield, Ohio, after false pets claims,” NBC News, September 16, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/30-bomb-threats-made-springfield-ohio-false-pets-claims-rcna171392.

[54] A.J. Bauer and Anthony Nadler, “Taking Conservative News Seriously,” in Anthony Nadler and A. J. Bauer, eds, News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) 14; Dimaggio, 207.

[55] Jesse Holcomb, Media Mistrust Has Been Growing for Decades—Does It Matter? Pew, October 17, 2024, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trend/archive/fall-2024/media-mistrust-has-been-growing-for-decades-does-it-matter. Also see  Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

[56] Steven Erlanger, ‘Fake News,’ Trump’s Obsession, Is Now a Cudgel for Strongmen, New York Times, December 12, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/world/europe/trump-fake-news-dictators.html.

[57] Committee to Protect Journalists and the Thomson Reuters Foundation,  Understanding the laws relating to “fake news” in Russia, August 2022, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Guide-to-Understanding-the-Laws-Relating-to-Fake-News-in-Russia.pdf.

[58] Global Disinformation Index, The Southport Riots: Online Disinformation and Offline Harm, September 2, 2024, https://www.disinformationindex.org/blog/2024-09-03-the-southport-riots-online-disinformation-and-offline-harm/.

[59] Anne Bocandé, 2024 World Press Freedom Index – journalism under political pressure, RSF, https://rsf.org/en/2024-world-press-freedom-index-journalism-under-political-pressure?year=2024&data_type=general.

[60] Levendusky MS (2013) Why do partisan media polarize viewers? American Journal of Political Science 57(3): 611–623; and Sander van der Linden, Costas Panagopoulos, Jon Roozenbeek, “You are fake news: political bias in perceptions of  fake news,” Media, Culture & Society 2020, Vol. 42(3) 460 –470.

 

Module 03: Construction of Truth
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