Skip to main content
Home
Snurblog — Axel Bruns

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Information
  • Blog
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Presentations
  • Press
  • Creative
  • Search Site

A Brief History of Rumours in the News

Snurb — Friday 15 September 2017 21:33
Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Future of Journalism 2017 |

The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2017 is Scott Eldridge, whose interest is in the presence of 'fake news' in its various guises in political campaign coverage. This includes news, rumour, and speculative fact, and indeed attempts to address political rumour go back at least to the Roman Empire.

The promise of print news was initially that it would shut down the circulation of rumour by providing black-on-white facts on a professionally organised, mass-market basis – yet rumour clearly persists nonetheless, in formulations such as "sources say", in the push towards insufficiently verified live reporting, and in the incorporation of public commentary from a variety of sources that may not be fully committed to the facts. Rumours exist in the crowd (e.g. on social media); at large (e.g. circulating irregularly online); and in the press (which lend them an aura of factuality).

Scott's project gathered some 1,400 news articles from major news outlets around the 2016 U.S. election and its aftermath, focussing especially on articles that addressed rumour topics. 'Trump' and related terms were central to such coverage, and surprisingly the term 'not' also appeared prominently; this was substantially driven by phrases like "whether or not this is true" that highlighted the speculative nature of particular stories, demonstrated journalistic authority over truth judgments, and discursively marginalised rumours (yet also perpetuated their circulation).

 

  • 1455 views
INFORMATION
BLOG
RESEARCH
PUBLICATIONS
PRESENTATIONS
PRESS
CREATIVE

Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

» more

Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

» more

Opinion and Press

Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

» more

Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

» more

Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

Bluesky profile

Mastodon profile

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) profile

Google Scholar profile

Mixcloud profile

[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence]

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.