The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
W Lance Bennett ◽  
Steven Livingston
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
False Information ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Institutional Legitimacy ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Mainstream Press ◽  
Official Information

Many democratic nations are experiencing increased levels of false information circulating through social media and political websites that mimic journalism formats. In many cases, this disinformation is associated with the efforts of movements and parties on the radical right to mobilize supporters against centre parties and the mainstream press that carries their messages. The spread of disinformation can be traced to growing legitimacy problems in many democracies. Declining citizen confidence in institutions undermines the credibility of official information in the news and opens publics to alternative information sources. Those sources are often associated with both nationalist (primarily radical right) and foreign (commonly Russian) strategies to undermine institutional legitimacy and destabilize centre parties, governments and elections. The Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States are among the most prominent examples of disinformation campaigns intended to disrupt normal democratic order, but many other nations display signs of disinformation and democratic disruption. The origins of these problems and their implications for political communication research are explored.

scholarly journals Electronic Documents in a Print World: Grey Literature and the Internet

2012 ◽  
Vol 143 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Environmental Science ◽  
Grey Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Online Publishing ◽  
Electronic Documents ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Post War

Reports and documents from government and other organisations have existed for centuries, but in the post-war period their production increased significantly. Computers, databases, desktop publishing software and the internet have revolutionised the ways documents can be produced and disseminated, allowing individuals, groups and organisations access to a whole new world of information. The result has been an explosion in online publishing that has transformed scholarly communication. Research reports – or grey literature as they are also known – are now an essential part of many disciplines, including science and technology, health, environmental science and many areas of public policy. While access to these reports has become easier in many respects, online publishing presents many challenges as well, particularly for collecting organisations faced with the task of adapting their systems. The management of grey literature raises many issues that are still not resolved today. This article provides some background to these ongoing challenges in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Borders, Mobility and Belonging in the Era of Brexit and Trump

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Gilmartin ◽  
Patricia Wood ◽  
Cian O'Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Ripple Effects ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The World

Questions of migration and citizenship are at the heart of global political debate with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump having ripple effects around the world. Providing new insights into the politics of migration and citizenship in the United Kingdom and the United States, this book challenges the increasingly prevalent view of migration and migrants as threats and of formal citizenship as a necessary marker of belonging. Instead the book offers an analysis of migration and citizenship in practice, as a counterpoint to simplistic discourses. It uses cutting-edge academic work on migration and citizenship to address three themes central to current debates: borders and walls, mobility and travel, and belonging. Through this analysis, a clearer picture of the roots of these politics emerges as well as of the consequences for mobility, political participation and belonging in the 21st century.

scholarly journals Features of Discursive Structures in Political Communication

2021 ◽  
pp. 38-50
Author(s):  
Vyacheslav D. Shevchenko ◽  
Nina A. Tribunskaya
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Discourse ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Security Discourse ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Subject ◽  
High Degree

This article is devoted to the study of the discursive structures of political texts published on Twitter of the President of the United States. The material of the study was the statements of Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the period from November 1, 2019 to August 31, 2021. Its multimillion audience of subscribers makes Twitter a powerful political tool with the ability to influence public opinion. The purpose of this article is to identify the discursive structures arising in political communication as a result of the actualization of the category of discursive heterogeneity, which includes elements of interdiscursiveness and polydiscursiveness. The authors use various methods: descriptive, contextual analysis, comparative, methods of observation, content analysis and discourse analysis. Using the linguistic concept of the American scientist D. Himes S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G, the analysis of the situation components Setting and scene, Participants, Ends, Act Sequence, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms, Genre is carried out. Being a part of the media discourse and demonstrating the features of the Internet genre, the written messages of politicians are laconic, expressive, and tend to economize on linguistic means. The same communicants, depending on the context of utterances, become participants in different types of discourses. The study analyzes the foreign and domestic political discourses, the security discourse, as well as a number of accompanying special discourses that constitute political communication. The choice of the subject matter of the messages is due to the high degree of importance of issues of foreign and domestic policy, as well as stability and security.

Scripts, Authority, and Legitimacy

2021 ◽  
pp. 404-420
Author(s):  
Julia C. Strauss
Keyword(s):  
Social Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Xi Jinping ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Written Text ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Political Performance ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
China Dream ◽  
Do So

Although it is widely recognized that performance permeates politics, there is surprisingly little agreement on how politics in performance plays out across different political and cultural environments. Focusing on the script as both written text and mutually constituted social role that attempts to reinforce legitimacy, this chapter develops two typologies. The first considers the script itself as either optimistic or pessimistic and that appeals to either reason or the emotions; the second how the script is imbricated with its prospective target audience(s) and the degree to which it attempts to divide or unite and either is closed or permits room for improvisation. It develops these typologies by comparing and contrasting the political performances of Xi Jinping and his optimistic and unifying “China Dream” in the increasingly authoritarian People’s Republic of China with the divisive, antitechnocratic jeremiad performances of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in the United States and the United Kingdom. It concludes that in other political contexts the substance of political performance scripts, the ways in which scripts engage audiences, and how they are modified over time are likely to vary, but to do so in patterned ways.

Hyperpartisan news: Rethinking the media for populist politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 146144482091041
Author(s):  
Maria Rae
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
New Agents ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Media ◽  
Start Ups ◽  
Better Than

Online media sites such as Breitbart News in the United States and The Canary in the United Kingdom have come to prominence as powerful new agents. Their reach and influence in the contemporary digital media ecology have been widely highlighted, yet there has been little scholarship to situate these important new players in the field of political communication. This article argues that, first, these ‘interlopers’ known as the ‘alt-right’ and ‘alt-left’ need to be understood as embedded in the context of populist politics. Second, ‘hyperpartisan’ describes these sites better than the framework of alternative media as it mirrors populism’s ideological pillar of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Finally, a deliberate provocation is argued to name these digital start-ups as news to create a starting point for conceptualising these disruptive new media forces.

scholarly journals Peculiarities of Modern Nationalist Messages in Online Political Communication: The Analyses of Donald Trump’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s Election Campaigns

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 350
Author(s):  
Olga V. Novoselova
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Communication Patterns ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Political Leaders

As digitalized election campaigns are a new phenomenon, there are almost no studies defining the peculiarities of modern nationalist messages in online political communication research. This article seeks to identify some communication patterns and recent innovations in delivering online nationalist messages. These patterns are regarded in conflation with nationalist and populist approaches by political leaders during their digital election campaigns. The literature review approach to making generalizations is chosen to explore the articulation of nationalist and populist messages during Donald Trump’s (The United States), and Jair Bolsonaro’s (Brazil) election campaigns. Overall, the study boils down to an analysis of the populist and nationalist signifiers in social media posts, and the degree to which their structures of meaning revolve around the vertical down/up or the horizontal in/out axis. As a result, some common traits of modern nationalist messages in online political communication are identified and future areas of research are proposed.

scholarly journals Twitter Discourse Analysis of US President Donald Trump

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
Tanase Tasente
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Performance Indicators ◽  
Mass Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Online Environment ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Heads Of State

Twitter has become a very powerful channel of political communication in recent years, many times overtaking, along with Facebook, traditional channels of mass communication, such as: TV, radio or newspapers. More then 500 million tweets are sent every day (5,787 tweets every second), and 326 million people use Twitter every month, even if there are 1.3 billion Twitter accounts. From the perspective of political communication, Twitter is ahead of Facebook, according to a study conducted in 2018 by Twiplomacy, which shows that 187 governments and heads of state maintain an official presence on Twitter. This mechanism of mass communication has benefited the politicians, especially those in the United States of America, who have generated a unique phenomenon in political communication: creating a map on polarization in the online environment.. This study focused on analyzing the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that facilitate Twitter Communication of Donald Trump, the President of United States of America (number of followers, types of tweets, engagement rate and interaction rate etc.) and analyzing Donald Trump's Twitter speech and identify the most commonly used expressions in Social Media during the term of President.  The monitoring period is 22.01.2019 - 16.08.2019.

scholarly journals Political communication in and about crises – Introduction to the Thematic Section

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Metag ◽  
Caroline Dalmus
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Thematic Section ◽  
The Subject

The financial crisis in Europe and the United States, the war in Syria, the refugee crisis, and terrorist attacks – crises seem to permeate everyday life and make headlines. Crisis as a central, persistent element of modern life has been the subject of scholarly discussions in various disciplines. Political communication research approaches crisis from two different angles. First, political crisis communication research deals with communication about political crises, such as political upheavals, protests, and subversions of governments and presidents. One of the most recent examples of a political crisis comes from Venezuela, where political changes and problems, such as corruption and undemocratic governance, have brought about economic problems (hyperinflation), a rising crime rate, hunger, and disease. Second, many other types of crises involve political communication because they also lead to policy reactions or at least discussion on their political aspects. For example, natural disasters typically provoke public discussion on the roles of political organizations and actors before, during, and after these disasters and the consequences for policy.

The Radical Right in the United States of America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Parker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
Tea Party ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
John Birch Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Behavior

This chapter examines the attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of the reactionary right in the United States. It seeks to provide a better understanding of what motivates the reactionary right, and how such motivations inform the policy preferences and behavior of its constituents. However, the paucity of data restricts the analysis of the reactionary right to a fifty-year span, from the 1960s through the Tea Party. It begins with an overview of reactionary thought, including a brief history of reactionary movements through the mid-twentieth century. It then conducts an assessment of the immediate predecessor of the Tea Party: the John Birch Society. This is followed by an analysis of the contemporary reactionary movement in the United States: the Tea Party, and the movement responsible for the election of Donald Trump. The conclusion also briefly touches upon the continuities (and discontinuities) between the Tea Party and its European counterparts.

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