After the excitement of the ECREA 2022 conference proper, my colleagues Sofya Glazunova, Dan Angus and I attended a further post-conference on Digital Media and Information Disorders that was organised by the excellent Anja Bechmann and her team, where we presented a number of papers.

First, Dan presented a paper on behalf of first author Edward Hurcombe on the way that Facebook’s owner Meta shapes the public perception of mis- and disinformation through its statements via the Facebook Newsroom, the platform’s main public relations outlet:

In a parallel session that morning, I presented a paper led by Aljosha Karim Schapals on the way that journalists perceive the challenge of ‘fake news’ rhetoric as a delegitimising force. This work has now also been published in an article in the journal Media and Communication:

The final speaker in this last ECREA 2022 session is Tiago Lapa, whose focus is on the far right in Portugal and Spain. Until a few years ago, these countries had no major far-right parties, but the Catalan independence struggle led to the emergence of Vox as a successful far-right party in Spain in 2017, and Chega followed in Portugal a couple of years later.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Judith Goetz, whose focus is on the Austrian Identitarian movement. This movement has been an effort to restore far-right language and and ideas into German-language discourse, not least by exploiting certain weaknesses and opportunities in centre-right discourses. This has pushed the boundaries of what can be said with impunity further and further to the right, and has established far-right views in the mainstream media and everyday life.

It’s the final session at ECREA 2022 already, and what an excellent conference it’s been – so good to be back away from Zoom and amongst the people. This final session is on the extreme right, and begins with a paper by Bart Cammaerts on the appropriation and normalisation of fascist, extreme-right discourses by more mainstream right-wing politicians. In the process, struggles for social justice are being abnormalised in turn.

The final keynote speaker at ECREA 2022 this week is Gary Younge, a former editor-at-large for The Guardian. He begins by playing a promotional video from his exploration of whiteness in America, from his perspective as a black man from the UK, which intended to flip the script on white journalists’ explorations of black lives in the US or UK. The clip went viral and Gary has kept getting recognised for it, even if the full documentary was perhaps not watched anywhere near as often.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by Eva Mayerhöffer and Jakob Bæk Kristensen, who start from the same interest in alternative media and digital counterpublics, understanding the latter especially as the digital environments that are established by the sharing of alternative media content and exploring their inward or outward orientation.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk, focussing on the relations between professional alternative media as an indication of boundaries in the journalistic field. This connects with a long history of research into field theory and boundary work in journalism.

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is Azade Kakavand, whose study compares far-right networks across multiple platforms. Far-right here means a broad grouping that also includes the radical and extreme right, as well as both electoral and non-electoral groups. The networks between these actors may be affected by the different affordances that the various social media platforms offer.