“Fake news”, “Junk news”, and “Misinformation” – there are a lot of concepts out there for journalists to use to describe similar phenomena. But do they really mean the same thing, and what are the implications of prioritising one over another? Johan Farkas has been studying how Danish journalists use and define these terms in the contemporary media landscape.
In a recently published article in the scientific journal Nordicom Review, Johan Farkas and Sabina Schousboe examine how journalists in Denmark use and define the terms fake news, junk news, misinformation, and disinformation. Mia Jonsson Lindell, communications officer at Nordicom, met with Johan Farkas to discuss the evolving landscape of concepts like fake news and misinformation, highlighting their impact on journalistic discourse and the challenges journalists face in navigating between academic definitions, political struggles, and audience accessibility.
Mia Jonsson Lindell (MJL): My first question is about these concepts that you are writing about in your article: fake news, misinformation, disinformation, and so on. There are many of these concepts around, and in your article, you study how Danish journalists understand and use them. Why is this important? Why study how journalists perceive these concepts?
Johan Farkas (JF): I think it’s important because these concepts have become widely used in recent years, and there’s been a lot of concern around them and political attention towards them. Scholars have observed that the term fake news is often used vaguely by journalists, to capture a lot of different things, and academics are somewhat guilty of the same ambiguity. This lack of clarity has resulted in a lot of different concepts and definitions within both academia and journalism. In this article, we investigate how Danish journalists reflect on the usage of these terms through interviews with them, in order to understand how we ended up with a quite messy conceptual landscape.
MJL: Okay. In your paper, you also show that fake news became a buzzword in Danish news in 2017. The concept is, however, used more seldom today, whereas mis- and disinformation are instead becoming more common. Is there, in your view, a risk that Scandinavian journalists “import” buzzwords that are not very relevant with regard to the national contexts? Fake news, for instance: Was this a big Danish problem in 2017?
JF: No, but it depends on how we define it. The events surrounding 2016–2017 – such as the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and allegations around Russian election interference – are logically something that journalists want to write about. Our article shows that journalists describe this period as a sudden explosion in popularity of especially the term fake news, which is also reflected in our analysis. While fake news, misinformation, and disinformation are all used more frequently today compared with before 2017, it’s not to the same explosive extent. Importantly, it’s not that one of these terms has really come to dominate over the others – they’re all in use.
We have also seen that journalists worry about being too value laden. They try to avoid terms that they perceive as not “neutral”. But this contributes to the problem they aim to address, as they end up changing the definitions of the terms. There seems to be a hope among journalists to find a term that is just clear and neutral – but the problem is that these terms will always come with some kind of judgement. In our article, we argue that journalists should embrace this reality, defining the terms they use and transparently explaining their reasoning. Because they very much produce meaning in their reporting, and judgment as well, to some extent.
MJL: Mis- and disinformation are now becoming more common. Do you think this is because we are increasingly aware of Russian propaganda and recent developments within artificial intelligence?
JF: Yes, I think so. But in our interviews, we can also see that journalists say that these terms are more neutral than, for example, fake news or junk news. At the same time, they also say that these terms are more technical and difficult for their audience to understand. But by mixing the terms they use and not defining them properly, they end up making things less clear. To be sure, it’s not like scholars have figured this out completely either. In some of my previous work, I have shown and criticised how scholars use these terms – and keep inventing new ones.
But, returning to why we wanted to publish this article: There was a paper from 2020 by Dr. Jana Laura Egelhofer and her colleagues in which they show that journalists in Austria use the term fake news as an empty buzzword. So, I guess our article tries to help explain why that is: Yes, it has to do with trends and hypes, but I think it also has to do with something deeper that springs from how journalists see the world and how they try to adhere to the value of objectivity. They want to be able to stick to facts and avoid value judgement, but in reality, it’s messier than that.
MJL: So, they want to be exact, but they also don’t want to use language that is too complicated or value laden. But instead of clinging to concepts such as fake news and mis- and disinformation, couldn’t they simply refer to things as “incorrect information”?
JF: I don’t think using true/false or incorrect/correct would solve the problem for journalists. In our article, we draw on rhetorical argumentation theory to say that “true” and “false” are also deeply contested terms and contain value judgements. If you write that a blog online publishes false or incorrect information, then that’s obviously a negative claim you are making. So yes, maybe sometimes it makes more sense to use correct or incorrect because it might be easier for some audiences to understand if that’s what journalists worry about. But it won’t solve the problem of these kind of expressions also being contested and containing judgements. You just can’t escape that.
MJL: Very interesting! In your article, you present a model of this ambivalence that journalists seem to have towards academics and scholars: While they turn to them for definitions and clarifications, they appear to think that academics tend to make things too complicated. You call this model “the perceived epistemic hierarchy”. Could you say something about this model, explain it in an easy and straightforward way?
JF: Yes! In our interviews, the journalists kept referring to themselves as being kind of the middlemen between academics, politicians, and citizens. Journalists like to import their definitions from somewhere – they don’t come up with their own. That’s something scholars do. So, the journalists look “up” to a perceived higher epistemic authority – academia – for clarity and definitions. But academia is, to them, at the same time a bit disconnected from the real world and too technical. This is where the problem arises. Journalists look towards academia for definitions, but they keep rejecting key parts of the definitions because they argue that they must account for those that are “beneath” them – their readers. They argue that they must translate from the high authority of academics to the low authority of audiences. They also say they must account for how politicians “dilute” meaning. So, what do they do, they switch to a new term. Or they import a term but not its academic definition, and it gets messy.
If we want to fix this and make things less messy, we argue that journalists must – and scholars as well – think and be careful about the ways in which we use these terms and be consistent. Even if politicians use them for political ends, we can’t just abandon ship at the first sign of a problem, because that is not going to solve anything.
MJL: That was very well explained. Okay, let’s move on to my final question: When conducting the interviews with the journalists, was there something that surprised you? Did you come across something that you had not expected or something that you would like to dig deeper into?
JF: What surprised me the most is how little it seems journalists reflect on the role they play in shaping meaning. It’s not a new finding, but it did surprise me to see it this clearly: that journalists don’t seem to reflect that much on how they, through their articles, shape how people understand the news, politics, and language. I think there’s more to study here, because it plays into the bigger questions of what journalism is going to be in the twenty-first century. How do we protect democracy? Is democracy in a crisis or not? All these terms have become key parts of that discussion because they remind people that journalism is important, but also that it is undergoing fundamental changes. I would say this also calls for reflection within journalism itself.
MJL: Thank you very much for meeting with me and good luck in your future projects!
Read the article
Facts, values, and the epistemic authority of journalism: How journalists use and define the terms fake news, junk news, misinformation, and disinformation
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