A Critical View of the Blurred Lines of Journalism

The last few months leading up to the National Communication Association’s 2020 Annual Conference was marked by the continuous denunciations of the journalistic organizations and platforms that perform the role of maintaining an informed public. Rhetorical attacks came from the bully pulpits and were invoked by those that followed political leaders’ ideological whims. Researchers in this area of the discipline need to be sharper in their scholarship to handle less-than-supported claims and manufactured evidence regarding the state of journalism in the United States and throughout the world. 

The scholars in the session that I chaired on Sunday addressed those issues head on in their research. I will attempt to summarize the critical points raised by these presenters and strive to interpret how this research could impact those in this field. 

Alternative Influence and New Hybridities: Articulating the Clash of YouTube and Mainstream Media Through The Hybrid Media System.

Ryan Kor-Sins from the University of Utah kicked off the session with her presentation entitled “Alternative Influence and New Hybridities: Articulating the Clash of YouTube and Mainstream Media Through The Hybrid Media System.” Kor-Sins grounded most of her research based around Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power as a way of describing the alternative media systems that emerge from social media platforms and Rebecca Lewis’ Alternative Influence Network (AIN) to articulate the rejection of the conceptualization of the mainstream media and the introduction of emotional influence to an alternative social network. Ryan examined the political influencers on YouTube to critique how they “leverage authenticity and ideological identification with followers” as a means of finding success on the platform. 

She continues to deconstruct the like-minded publics connected by an ideological platform through Chadwick’s definitions of a media system, media logics, and the social network’s power structure. I found her deep-dive on Chadwick’s types of hybridity useful when examining those interconnected social structures within the political influencers’ social networks. Ryan chose to move in this direction for the rest of her presentation. The focus made sense as it is the nexus of algorithmic development within the social network, the interwoven level of support that political influencers receive on those social networks, and how those political influencers to bridge across or transfer to another social network when they are either de-platformed and lose their influence on a given social network. Kor-Sins get to the heart of her argument by noting that: 

• AIN is one part of a more extensive, constantly changing hybrid media system, and
• AIN will continue to be internalized as a competitor to mainstream media sources through the injection of extreme partisan media logics into online social discourses and attempt to use those logics as a means of gaining power and influence throughout cultural industries. 

Kor-Sins’ research seems to be timely due to the events over the past few weeks and the claims of some to transfer to non-traditional social network services as a means of protesting perceived oversight and negative feedback within the traditional social network services. I’ve wondered if those newer non-traditional social network services would find success. They seem to lack the four criteria that social networks need to gain new users and maintain them as a continuing audience. A successful social network needs first to have a critical mass of users to be thriving. My definition of a critical mass of users is any social network with enough people on the platform to make the website subjectively feel like an active community. Users get to the point that they feel confident to use the platform regularly. 

Non-traditional social networks described by Kor-Sins also fail at the second criteria of a successful social network service. A diversity of experiences and opinions shared by those users would lack a service built on homogeneous like-minded publics. This echo-chamber environment also fails at the third criteria, interacting with a wide range of people through thoughtful engagement on the site. Thoughtful engagement occurs between community members when those users take the time to process that information to turn it into knowledge about their community and come to a rational conclusion expressed via the social network. As with the diversity of experiences and opinions, this process will not happen within the system. But, it happens enough that it feels like community dialogues are happening on the site. It is that rational conclusion that I would argue that would be lacking in that system. 

Kor-Sins’ presentation promotes the possibility of success of non-traditional social networks as there is potential underlying value in engaging with the users on that network. I defined underlying values as having the following qualities: 

• a revenue source for an organization,
• access to people, stories, and communities that are newsworthy,
• controlling a particular market,
• promoting democratic practices and culture,
• advancing pro-social behaviors and ideals,
• maintaining a sense of local community,
• access to users that can craft compelling narratives that might gain an audience for the organization,
• or a combination of the above-listed definitions.

I think the idea of compelling narratives and the users being a revenue source would give some small glimmer that these non-traditional social networks would find some form of success.

Incredible News and News Credibility: Understanding the Link Between Media Use, Partisanship and Credibility Perceptions of Disinformation

Hannah Overbye (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) presented her paper co-written by Marisa A. Smith (Michigan State University) and Travis L. Dixon (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), which examined how bad actors can quickly spread disinformation via social networks. Overbye began with the logical argument that the nature of digital environments allows for the seamless dissemination of information to social media users regardless if the message is accurate or not. Her focus on clickbait headlines to spread misinformation is crucial to their more significant point regarding the disinformation campaigns present on traditional social media services. The disinformation campaigns that Overbye et al. focused on in this research had two themes. The first theme was that partisan sites were more likely to be driving misinformation within traditional social media services. Content about minorities also pushed much of the disinformation within conventional social media services. 

What I found useful in this presentation is how Hannah established the operational definitions early on in the presentations and used those concepts to nail down the key research constructions in the scholarship. Disinformation was defined using Faris’ et al. (2017) work on the concept. Specifically, disinformation is “politically motivated news to deliberately meant to misinterpret and misrepresent facts in order to persuade an audience.” The authors used a credibility perception model to examine how disinformation is transmitted via traditional social media services. Metzger & Flanagin (2015) and Pornpitakpan (2004) frame the credibility argument as using a “multidimensional, subjective entity determined by audience perceptions. Assessments of credibility require that audiences consider the believability, trustworthiness, and accuracy of the information.” Hannah goes on to denote that “credible information is more effective in shaping information processing and subsequent effects.” This precise denotative examination allowed the scholars to embed valuable theoretical concepts into the presentation and research.

Framing the examination of how disinformation campaigns bypass the established credibility assessment we have while consuming content online was achieved by investigating the link between the two under the guise of cognitive accessibility theory and motivated reasoning theory. Overbye et al. explain that accessible schema is a means of short-circuiting the normal credibility assessment one does when looking at news online. Accessible schema is when a story uses the same framing narratives to advance a particular disinformation agenda. The motivated reasoning used for this research is based on partisan motivated reasoning. Partisan motivated reasoning works in this context as crime and immigration tends to be conservative talking points independent of locus, brachylogy, or irony. Both of these theoretical concepts merge within traditional social media services. 

Overbye et al. argue that partisanship does partly explain why people find disinformation credible, with highly credible sources being the most effective in shaping information processing and subsequent effect. Disinformation in accessible schema might impact racial attitudes and policy preferences among those exposed to this content. The biggest driver of this accessible schema being cable news shows. Interventions to correct these types of campaigns must recognize the impact partisanship has on the viewer of disinformation. 

This research is also timely as the partisan shift in defining credible sources happened rapidly in the last few weeks. The cable news environment has opened up more fringe options outside of the usual cable news channels. Media scholars will need to consider how these newer platforms impact the spread of disinformation online.

Interpreting Soft-News Narratives as Fake: Does Reference to a Politician Activate Suspicion?

The third presentation continues with the schema theme as Nathan Cutietta (Heidelberg University) and Frederick Busselle (Bowling Green State University) discussed if having a politician reference in a news article is more likely for audiences to deem a news story to be fake when compared to stories that contain no references to politicians. Their research also looked at how the hostile media effect research impacted the audience’s perception when it came to these types of stories. All of their discussion hit on the term that has become toxic in my eyes, “fake news.”

Cutietta’s presentation began with a brief background on the term. Their connection between the fake news arguments of today with the development of yellow journalism during the Spanish-American War provided a useful context to this term. I do question the incorporation of Orson Wells’ version of “War of the Worlds” in this description. The dramatization of journalism within the radio drama is fundamentally different from the real-world effects of drumming up support for war in the United States at the end of the 19th century. Other scholars have brought up the connection in the past. I think it dilutes the nature of this term as media scholars have defined it over the past decade. 

I found it insightful how Cutietta and Busselle used the Fairness Doctrine’s elimination in 1987 as a touchpoint to amplify fake news in the United States’ media systems. They point to that moment in time as the catalyst for the rise of “mostly unregulated social media platforms” and “foreign governments and other organizations actively creating and promoting fake news stories.” The rebirth of AM radio as a partisan platform is directly connected to the researchers’ three points. Barriers to access the media system regarding injecting misinformation and disinformation decreased over the past four decades. 

Their study’s major takeaway was the incorporation of asking people if they thought a given story was fake. Few participants (6%) of one of their studies judged a story to be manufactured if asked generic questions about the content. The percentage was significantly higher (49.1%) if those same people critically analyze the same story to determine if it was fake. This additional step seems to favor media literacy to prevent spreading misinformation on traditional social media services.

No Trade-offs between Online News and Entertainment Consumption

The session’s final presentation came from a paper written by Shengchun Huang and Tian Yang, both from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, dealing with the impact that media choice will have on the audience’s inadvertent learning and fragmentation. Shengchun and Tian’s focus on the news versus entertainment “dichotomy” is especially useful during this period in the media. Their locus on the concerns of the consequences of a high-choice media environment on the grounds that audiences will choose less news and informative content due to general low political interest among the population echoes the research in the discipline. 

Both scholars rightfully pointed out during this presentation that a majority of scholarship in this area failed to account for non-news sources within the artifacts of scholarship, nor did the previous research codify the potential content preference of those that participated in the study. The question of “are the audience fragmented on media content” was central to this presentation. This question led the researchers to pose two competing hypotheses, addressing fragmentation at the audience level and the individuals within the audience. Their first hypothesis was, “audience fragmentation exists between different content genres.” This hypothetical construction means “for an individual, the amount of news consumption is negatively associated with that of non-news consumption.” The second hypothesis simply states that “no fragmentation exists between content genres or categories.” Individuals in the second hypothetical state would follow “the amount of news consumption is positively associated with that of non-news consumption.” 

Shengchun and Tian used 57 different tags and categories to fragmentize the over 768,159 articles and 89,266 users within their study based on the datasets provided by Toutiao and Nielsen Web. The overall purpose was to determine if users simply sought out and consumed media content that suited their interest while avoiding the content that would lead to inadvertent learning. These content sets explored by the researchers existed in what Webster & Ksiazek (2012) would describe as a co-exposure network. They found that audiences are not fragmented between different media genres or content preferences. When individuals were examined regarding the consumption of news versus non-news content, it was discovered that there was a positive correlation between the two. 

The researchers argue that the implication of this study is two-fold. The system/audience wide implication of this research is that the algorithms that drive mediated consumption online allow for a form of automated serendipity for the audiences within a given media platform. Those media platforms also enable individuals “abundant media choices which might facilitate news exposure” within the platform. 

Shengchun and Tian seem to be arguing in this study that accidental exposure to news content is a natural by-product of the hypermediated structure of online interactions. We can not help but be exposed to relevant information about our world by merely participating in social media interactions.

Quo Vadimus?

It’s hard to take away one clear message from this divergent set of scholarly work. Looking at the content produced by bad actors in the field, media literacy can protect against the long-term harm from their actions. Scholars must look for better means of identifying credible content to defend misinformation campaigns from wreaking havoc on traditional social media systems. These means should do a more thorough job of tagging false stories and preventing their transmission. Finally, when people use a diverse set of media sources, they are more likely to be better informed about the world. 

Overall, I’m okay with that conclusion. It is not just an individual’s responsibility to avoid being fooled by false news. It’s a collective act that should be employed to protect online communities from bad actors who use disinformation campaigns to harm society as a whole. A single person can not handle the onslaught of misinformation.