How Journalists View (Politicians’) Disinformation

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Maria Kyriakidou, whose focus is on journalistic understandings of disinformation. This is as part of the Countering Disinformation research project.

The project drew on nine semi-structured interviews with UK-based journalists, editors, and fact-checkers in January 2020 to explore how they understood disinformation, and how saw their role in tackling it. Such perspectives may well have evolved further in the face of the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic, of course.

Much of the focus in the journalists’ responses was on political lies at this stage, therefore, and they noted that politicians now appear far more willing to lie outright in order to achieve their political aims; this was seen as a qualitative change from earlier times. At the same time, they are also less willing to subject themselves to critical interviews and political debates, or to bring journalists along on the campaign trail – through social media, they now communicate directly to the public, and this undermines the journalistic gatekeeping role.

Journalists feel a need to reclaim their watchdog role, therefore, and even feel that politicians should be compelled (at least during election campaigns) on public service media. Fact-checking was also seen as an important tool in the journalistic arsenal, but selecting the claims to focus on is difficult – especially when the language used by politicians is often so vague that it cannot easily be checked and debunked. Fact-checking is also seen as an aggressive approach to politicians’ lies, and public service media in particular cannot necessarily take such an explicitly combative stance.

There is also uncertainty about the news audience, and what it wants from journalism. Indeed, it is clear from other studies that there is a substantial gap between the needs expressed by audiences themselves, and the journalists’ understandings of what audiences want: audiences want journalists to challenge political claims, but perhaps not necessarily in the form of fact-checks.

So, disinformation challenges the news media’s watchdog role, and (pre-pandemic) journalists mainly blamed politicians and social media for the current state of affairs. Their focus, however, was on their relationship with politicians, rather than with their audiences – this means that they are responding to new challenges in old ways, which may not be particularly productive.