‘Fake News’ Discourse in Australian Politics

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Scott Wright, who begins with a brief history of the ‘fake news’. There are actually false news stories, news stories that are described as ‘fake’ by politicians such as Donald Trump for political reasons, and false information that is deliberately disseminated by politicians for such reasons.

In Australia, for instance, there was substantial coverage of the ‘fake news’ debate in the U.S., sensitising voters to the issue; the use of ‘fake news’ as a label for news coverage particular politicians did not like; and outright lies about a ‘death tax’ purportedly planned by the Labor Party in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election (which Facebook refused to take down because such stories were not ‘news’ by its tautological definition).

Australians have a very low trust in the media to begin with, and this is further undermined by such issues. But how ‘fake news’ plays out here is also shaped by the national political and media system, and this will necessarily result in different processes than it does in the U.S. or U.K.

The project studied this by examining a number of the different types of ‘fake news’ discourse events as identified in the typology developed by Wardle & Derakhshan, across mainstream news, politicians’ stew, social media posts, and the parliamentary Hansard record. The ‘fake news’ tag was used especially by the leading mainstream politicians and a number of fringe politicians, as well as by conservative press outlets.

Such discourse was mainly used to attack the news media as well as opposing politicians, but these uses were rarely contested: media outlets attacked as publishing ‘fake news’ during press conferences were not given an opportunity to defend their coverage, for instance. But these attacks remain a relatively minor part of Australian political debate, outside of fringe politicians, and in reporting them journalists are often complicit in perpetuating such discourses.