Industrial Journalism

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Ernesto de León; his focus is on hyperpartisan, alternative, and conspiracy (HAC) media. These are all united by an anti-establishment dimension: they peddle misinformation that has a potential to shape public perceptions.

The third speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Michael Hameleers. He begins by highlighting the supposed threat of mis- and disinformation, but also notes that the dissemination of such content is not necessarily very widespread; news users are very concerned about misinformation, however, and about their own susceptibility to such misinformation – they think much of the information they encounter is mis- or disinformation.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Peter van Aelst, whose interest is in how news media consumption affects conspiracy theory beliefs. Mediating factors here might include misperception and populist attitudes, and the present paper examines this in the context of conspiracy theories that believe that a small elite of actors deliberately hide the truth about what is happening in the world.

The final day at ECREA 2024 begins for me with a panel on conspiracy theories, and a paper by the great Annett Heft. Her focus is on the diffusion dynamics of conspiracy theories across platforms. She begins by noting the substantial growth in conspiracy theory diffusion, and the severe consequences these ideas can have. Cross-platform activity (involving social media, social messaging, multimedia platforms, alternative news media, and mainstream media) can further heighten this impact.

The next speakers in this ECREA 2024 session are Sabina Mihelj and Václav Štětka, presenting a new framework for the understanding of current trends towards illiberalism. This focus on illiberalism follows the dismissal of the concept of populism as ill-defined; illiberalism is instead marking a grey zone between democracy and authoritarianism, and communication is a central element in its rise – indeed, there is a need to better investigate the illiberal public sphere.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Martin Marinos, whose interest is in populism and the far right in Bulgaria. He begins by challenging the notion of illiberalism, suggesting that the opposition between liberalism and illiberalism is not absolute, and that many countries instead display a kind of ‘ill liberalism’ instead. Historically, too, liberalism has sometimes led to the emergence of far-right regimes, so the border between liberalism and fascism is somewhat porous.

We continue this second day of the ECREA 2024 conference with the second conference keynote, by Jelena Kleut. Her focus is on uncertainties in transitional media systems. She begins by noting the various present-day communicative disorders – disinformation, political dysfunction, hate speech and abuse, etc. – but also warns us not to lose track of the positive potentials of contemporary communication technologies amongst all the doom and gloom. A balanced assessment of the current situation remains critical.

This points to a considerable level of uncertainty, too – and this can be generative (of research, and of overall progress for society), but equally also produce social and societal anxieties that lead citizens to seek easy answers and solutions. Jelena’s focus here is on the countries of the western Balkans, which have been described as ‘transitional democracies’ for the past 30 years at least; here, too, uncertainties persist, and may be divided into top-down, structurally driven uncertainties and bottom-up, audience-driven uncertainties.

These are reflected for instance in mainstream media reporting approaches, and the dissemination of disinformation that surrounds or responds to this reporting. Why does such disinformation circulate? At the structural, top-down level we have been seeing the rise of a politics of uncertainty, used as a tool by autocrats and illiberal forces to shore up their systems of electoral authoritarianism. This connects with the capture of state and societal institutions by such political actors, which makes the actions of these institutions themselves uncertain and unreliable as they are no longer based on the rule of law and democratic foundations. Such electoral authoritarian governments also control access to information, therefore.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Dennis Andersson, whose interest is in the effect of ideological news use in Sweden. The observation that people hold diametrically opposed beliefs about where society is heading is not new, and predates online and social media use; education and other socioeconomic factors, as well as news media use, are often seen as factors in influencing citizens’ belief structures.

The second day at ECREA 2024 starts with yet another panel on polarisation, with begins with a paper by Diógenes Lycarião. His interest is in testing the hypothesis that digitalisation and platformisation are fragmenting the public sphere. This is critical since much of the scholarly discussion on this public sphere fragmentation hypothesis to date builds on unverified assumptions.

The next ECREA 2024 session is also on polarisation, and I’m chairing as well as blogging it. We start with Petra de Place Bak, whose interest is in the cognitive preferences that make specific types of online content more salient and shareable. One aspect of this might be sentiment- and emotion-based biases.