The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism 2021 PDF

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MEDIA DISINFORMATION AND POPULISM This Companion brings together a diverse set of concepts used to analyse dimensions of media disinformation and populism globally. The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism explores how recent transformations in the architecture of public communication and particular attributes of the digital media ecology are conducive to the kind of polarised, anti-rational, post-fact, post-truth communication championed by populism. It is both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, consisting of contributions from leading and emerging scholars analysing aspects of misinformation, disinformation, and populism across countries, political systems, and media systems. A global, comparative approach to the study of misinformation and populism is important in identifying common elements and characteristics, and these individual chapters cover a wide range of topics and themes, including fake news, mediatisation, propaganda, alternative media, immigration, science, and law-making, to name a few. This Companion is a key resource for academics, researchers, and policymakers as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of political communication, journalism, law, sociology, cultural studies, international politics, and international relations. Howard Tumber is Professor in the Department of Journalism at City, University of London, UK. He is a founder and editor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism. He has published widely on the sociology of media and journalism. Silvio Waisbord is Director of and Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, USA. He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Communication, and he has published widely about news, politics, and social change. THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MEDIA DISINFORMATION AND POPULISM Edited by Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-43576-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-70491-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00443-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC CONTENTS List of figures xi List of tables xii List of contributors xiii Introduction 1 Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord 1 Media, disinformation, and populism: problems and responses 13 Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord PART I Key concepts 27 2 What do we mean by populism? 29 Carlos de la Torre 3 Misinformation and disinformation 38 Rachel Armitage and Cristian Vaccari 4 Rethinking mediatisation: populism and the mediatisation of politics 49 Daniel C. Hallin 5 Media systems and misinformation 59 Jonathan Hardy v Contents 6 Rewired propaganda: propaganda, misinformation, and populism in the digital age 71 Sarah Oates 7 Hate propaganda 80 Cherian George 8 Filter bubbles and digital echo chambers 92 Judith Möller 9 Disputes over or against reality? Fine-graining the textures of post-truth politics 101 Susana Salgado 10 Fake news 110 Edson C. Tandoc Jr. PART II Media misinformation and disinformation 119 11 The evolution of computational propaganda: theories, debates, and innovation of the Russian model 121 Dariya Tsyrenzhapova and Samuel C. Woolley 12 Polarisation and misinformation 131 Johanna Dunaway 13 Data journalism and misinformation 142 Oscar Westlund and Alfred Hermida 14 Media and the ‘alt-right’ 151 George Hawley 15 ‘Listen to your gut’: how Fox News’s populist style changed the American public sphere and journalistic truth in the process 160 Reece Peck 16 Alternative online political media: challenging or exacerbating populism and mis/disinformation? 169 Declan McDowell-Naylor, Richard Thomas, and Stephen Cushion vi Contents 17 Online harassment of journalists as a consequence of populism, mis/disinformation, and impunity 178 Jeannine E. Relly 18 Lessons from an extraordinary year: four heuristics for studying mediated misinformation in 2020 and beyond 188 Lucas Graves 19 Right-wing populism, visual disinformation, and Brexit: from the UKIP ‘Breaking Point’ poster to the aftermath of the London Westminster bridge attack 198 Simon Faulkner, Hannah Guy, and Farida Vis PART III The politics of misinformation and disinformation 209 20 Misogyny and the politics of misinformation 211 Sarah Banet-Weiser 21 Anti-immigration disinformation 221 Eileen Culloty and Jane Suiter 22 Science and the politics of misinformation 231 Jeremy Levy, Robin Bayes, Toby Bolsen, and James N. Druckman 23 Government disinformation in war and conflict 242 Rhys Crilley and Precious N. Chatterje-Doody 24 Military disinformation: a bodyguard of lies 253 Kevin Foster 25 Extreme right and mis/disinformation 268 Thomas Frissen, Leen d’Haenens, and Michaël Opgenhaffen 26 Information disorder practices in/by contemporary Russia 279 Svetlana S. Bodrunova 27 Protest, activism, and false information 290 Jennifer Earl, Rina James, Elliot Ramo, and Sam Scovill vii Contents 28 Conspiracy theories: misinformed publics or wittingly believing false information? 302 Jaron Harambam 29 Corrupted infrastructures of meaning: post-truth identities online 312 Catherine R. Baker and Andrew Chadwick 30 Consumption of misinformation and disinformation 323 Sophie Lecheler and Jana Laura Egelhofer PART IV Media and populism 333 31 Populism in Africa: personalistic leaders and the illusion of representation 335 Bruce Mutsvairo and Susana Salgado 32 Populism and misinformation from the American Revolution to the twenty-first-century United States 345 Chris Wells and Alex Rochefort 33 Populism, media, and misinformation in Latin America 356 Ignacio Siles, Larissa Tristán, and Carolina Carazo 34 Perceived mis- and disinformation in a post-factual information setting: a conceptualisation and evidence from ten European countries 366 Michael Hameleers and Claes de Vreese 35 The role of social media in the rise of right-wing populism in Finland 376 Karina Horsti and Tuija Saresma 36 Social media manipulation in Turkey: actors, tactics, targets 386 Bilge Yesil 37 Populist rhetoric and media misinformation in the 2016 UK Brexit referendum 397 Glenda Cooper 38 Media policy failures and the emergence of right-wing populism 411 Des Freedman viii Contents 39 Disentangling polarisation and civic empowerment in the digital age: the role of filter bubbles and echo chambers in the rise of populism 420 William H. Dutton and Craig T. Robertson PART V Responses to misinformation, disinformation, and populism 435 40 Legal and regulatory responses to misinformation and populism 437 Alison Harcourt 41 Global responses to misinformation and populism 449 Daniel Funke 42 Singapore’s fake news law: countering populists’ falsehoods and truth-making 459 Shawn Goh and Carol Soon 43 Debunking misinformation 470 Eun-Ju Lee and Soo Yun Shin 44 News literacy and misinformation 480 Melissa Tully 45 Media and information literacies as a response to misinformation and populism489 Nicole A. Cooke 46 People-powered correction: fixing misinformation on social media 498 Leticia Bode and Emily K. Vraga 47 Countering hate speech 507 Babak Bahador 48 Constructing digital counter-narratives as a response to disinformation and populism 519 Eva Giraud and Elizabeth Poole 49 Journalistic responses to misinformation 529 Maria Kyriakidou and Stephen Cushion 50 Responses to mis/disinformation: practitioner experiences and approaches in low income settings 538 James Deane ix Contents 51 The effect of corrections and corrected misinformation 548 Emily Thorson and Jianing Li 52 Building connective democracy: interdisciplinary solutions to the problem of polarisation 559 Christian Staal Bruun Overgaard, Anthony Dudo, Matthew Lease, Gina M. Masullo, Natalie Jomini Stroud, Scott R. Stroud, and Samuel C. Woolley Index569 x FIGURES 10.1 Elements of ‘fake news’ 112 19.1 UK Independence Party Leader (UKIP) Nigel Farage addresses the media during a national poster launch campaign ahead of the EU referendum in London on 16 June 2016 199 19.2 Sequence frame showing a woman visibly distressed passing the scene of the terrorist incident on Westminster Bridge, London, 22 March 2017 200 34.1 A depiction of the mean scores of mis- and disinformation perceptions in the ten countries under study 371 39.1 Average number of online political news sources consulted often or very often 429 39.2 Average frequency of ‘reading something you disagree with’ when looking for news or political information 430 40.1 The frequency of ‘fake news’ in Google Trends (2004–2018) 438 41.1 Countries that have taken action against online mis- and disinformation 452 xi TABLES 39.1 Populism scale items and percentage of respondents in each country who agreed or strongly agreed 424 39.2 Multiple regressions predicting populist attitudes 426 39.3 Multiple regressions predicting level of agreement with the political opinions or content posted by friends on social media 427 39.4 Logistic regressions predicting communication primarily with politically similar others online 427 39.5 Multiple regressions predicting number of online political news sources consulted often or very often 428 39.6 Multiple regressions predicting frequency of ‘reading something you disagree with’ when looking for news or political information 430 44.1 Defining news literacy: 5 Cs 482 xii CONTRIBUTORS Rachel Armitage is a PhD candidate in the Online Civic Culture Centre at Loughborough University. Her research aims to identify the political and social psychological roots of misin- formation and disinformation and to explore how different interventions on social media might reduce individuals’ propensity to share such content. Rachel holds a BA in political science from the University of Birmingham and is a 2016 Nottingham Roosevelt Memorial Travelling Scholar. She has worked in both community engagement and local government, with a specific focus on promoting democratic participation. Babak Bahador is Associate Research Professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs (SMPA) at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the University of Canter- bury in New Zealand. He holds a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on the overlap of media and politics/international relations, with primary focus on peacebuilding. At GW, Babak directs the Media and Peacebuilding Pro- ject, which aims to bridge the gap between academic research and peacebuilding practice. He is also a faculty member at GW’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics. Catherine R. Baker is a PhD researcher in the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C) at Lough- borough University. Her research focuses on infrastructures of meaning, identity, and rhetoric within the online misogynist incel movement. Catherine holds a first-class honours degree in psychology from Trinity College Dublin, where she also worked as a research assistant in the Trinity Institute of Neuroscience. Sarah Banet-Weiser is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She is the author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (1999), Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (2007), Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (2012), and Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (2018). She is the co-editor of Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (2007), Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (2012), and Racism Pos- tRace (2019) and has published in journals such as Social Media and Society, International Journal of Communication, American Quarterly, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Feminist The- ory, and Cultural Studies. xiii Contributors Robin Bayes is a PhD candidate in political science at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the political communication and political psychology of science-related policy issues, particularly the environment, sustainability, and climate change. In recent projects, she has investigated the motivational dynamics behind partisan-motivated reasoning, the need for publicly available data sources regarding science literacy and attitudes in the American public, and the future of climate change consensus messaging research. Leticia Bode is a provost’s distinguished Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture, and Technology master’s programme at Georgetown University. She researches the intersection of communication, technology, and political behaviour, emphasising the role communication and information technologies may play in the acquisition, use, effects, and implications of political information. Svetlana S. Bodrunova is habilitated Doctor of Political Science and Professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, St. Petersburg State University, Russia. She has led five research projects and published two books, several chapters, and over 80 research papers in Russian and English on Russian and European journalism, media and politics, social media, and automated methods of media research. She leads the Center for International Media Research in her university. Her works have appeared in Journalism, International Journal of Communication, Media and Communication, and Journalism Practice. She is a co-creator and host of CMSTW, an annual conference on comparative media studies. Toby Bolsen is Associate Professor of Political Science and Faculty Affiliate at the Urban Stud- ies Institute, Georgia State University. He studies public opinion, political behaviour, science and political communication, and experimental methods. Carolina Carazo is Professor of Media and Political Communication in the School of Com- munication at the University of Costa Rica. She obtained her PhD in sociology from Uni- versidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Spain) and holds a master’s degree in political communication (Emerson College, Boston, MA). She is a researcher at the Communication Research Center at University of Costa Rica and has published articles on media, journalism, and political communication. Andrew Chadwick is Professor of Political Communication in the Department of Commu- nication and Media at Loughborough University, where he is also director of the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C). Precious N. Chatterje-Doody is Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at Open Uni- versity, UK. Her multidisciplinary research interests centre on questions of communication, soft power, identity, and security, particularly in relation to Russia. She has published articles in Poli- tics, Critical Studies on Security, and Media and Communication, and her monographs, ‘The Russian Identity riddle: Unwrapping Russia’s Security Policy’ and ‘Russia Today and Conspiracy The- ory’ (with Dr. Ilya Yablokov, Leeds University) are due to be published by Routledge in 2021. Nicole Cooke is the Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina. Her research and teaching interests include human information behaviour, critical cultural information studies, and diversity and social justice in librarianship. She was the 2019 ALISE Excellence in Teaching Award recipient, and she has edited and authored several books, including Information Services to Diverse Populations and Fake News and Alternative Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-truth Era. xiv Contributors Glenda Cooper (PhD) is Senior Lecturer in journalism at City, University of London. She is the author of Reporting Humanitarian Disasters in a Social Media Age (Routledge, 2018) and co-editor of Humanitarianism, Communications and Change (Peter Lang, 2015). Prior to City, she was the 14th Guardian Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and has worked as a staff reporter and editor at The Independent, the Sunday Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, and BBC Radio 4. Rhys Crilley is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics and Interna- tional Relations at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. His current research explores the poli- tics of nuclear weapons through an attention to narratives and emotions in policies of deterrence and strategies for disarmament. Rhys has published on the intersections of popular culture, social media, and war in several journal articles, and he is currently working on writing his first monograph. Eileen Culloty is Post-doctoral Researcher at the Dublin City University Institute for Future Media and Journalism, where she leads research on countering disinformation as part of the H2020 project Provenance (grant no. 825227). Stephen Cushion is Professor at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture. He has written three sole-authored books, News and Politics: The Rise of Live and Interpretive Journalism (2015, Routledge), The Democratic Value of News: Why Public Service Media Matter (2012, Palgrave), and Television Journalism (2012, Sage), and one co-authored book, Reporting Elections: Rethinking the Logic of Campaign Coverage (2018, Polity Press, and co-edited The Future of 24-Hour News (2016, Peter Lang) and The Rise of 24-Hour News (2010, Peter Lang). He has published over 70 journal articles, book chapters, and reports on issues related to news, politics, and journalism. James Deane is Director of Policy and Research at BBC Media Action, the BBC’s inter- national media support charity. He is also the principal author of a feasibility study to create a new international fund for public interest media. James is a founding member and former executive director of the Panos Institute, founded in 1986 to inform and improve devel- oping country–driven public debate on environment and development issues. He is also chair of the Board of Global Voices, a citizens’ journalism network. He is the author and commissioner of multiple briefings and publications on the role of media in international development. Carlos de la Torre is Professor and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. He has been a fellow at the Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. He is the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (2019); The Promise and Perils of Populism (2015); and Latin American Populism of the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Cynthia Arnson (2013). He is the author of Populisms: A Quick Immersion and Populist Seduction in Latin America. Claes de Vreese is Professor and Chair of Political Communication in the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam (UvA). He is the founding director of the Center for Politics and Communication. His research interests include technol- ogy and democracy; comparative journalism research; the effects of news, public opinion, and European integration; and the effects of information and campaigning on elections, referen- dums, and direct democracy. xv Contributors Leen d’Haenens is Professor in Communication Science at the Institute for Media Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences in KU Leuven, where she teaches Analysis of Media Texts and European Media Policy at the BA level and Media, Audiences and Identity at the MA level. Her research interests touch upon the topic of young people and (social) media use, with a focus on vulnerable youth. She combines quantitative and qualitative methods; multi-site comparisons; and, in recent years, ‘small data’ with ‘big data’ methods. She is co-editor of Communications: the European Journal of Communication Research and associate editor of The International Communica- tion Gazette. She is a member of the Euromedia Research Group. James N. Druckman is the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University. He studies public opinion, sci- ence and political communication, and experimental methods. Anthony Dudo (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Associate Professor at the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Texas at Austin and the programme director for science communication in the Center for Media Engagement. Anthony researches the intersection of science, media, and society. He is particularly interested in scientists’ public engagement activities, media representations of science and environmental issues, and the contributions of informational and entertainment media to public perceptions of science. His recent work has examined factors influencing scientists’ likelihood to engage in public communication, scientists’ goals for public engagement, and the growing community of science communication trainers. Johanna Dunaway is Associate Professor at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on political communication and media effects on political learning, attitudes, and behavior. Her current research examines the political impact of the changing contemporary media environ- ment. Her work appears in journals such as The American Journal of Political Science; Information, Communication & Society; The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication; The Journal of Com- munication; The Journal of Politics; Journalism Studies; PLoS One; Political Communication; Political Research Quarterly; Political Behavior; Public Opinion Quarterly; and Social Science Quarterly. She also co-authored the 9th and 10th editions of Mass Media and American Politics. William H. Dutton is Emeritus Professor at the University of Southern California; an Oxford Martin Fellow, supporting the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre at the University of Oxford’s Department of Computer Science; a senior fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII); and a visiting professor in media and communication at the University of Leeds. Until 2018, Bill was the James H. Quello Professor of Media and Information Policy at Michigan State University, where he was the director of the Quello Center. Prior to that, he was the OII’s founding director and the first professor of internet studies at Oxford University. Jennifer Earl is Professor of Sociology and Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on social movements, information technologies, and the sociology of law, with research emphases on internet activism, social movement repression, youth activism, and legal change. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for research from 2006 to 2011 on web activism, was a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics, and co-authored (with Katrina Kimport) Digitally Enabled Social Change. Jana Laura Egelhofer is a PhD candidate at the Department of Communication, University of Vienna. Her research interests include fake news and disinformation, media criticism, political xvi Contributors journalism, and media perceptions. Her work has been published in international journals such as Annals of the International Communication Association and Journalism Studies. Simon Faulkner is Senior Lecturer in art history and visual culture at Manchester Met- ropolitan University. His research is concerned with the political uses and meanings of images, with a particular emphasis on conflict, activism, and protest. Since 2007, this research has been particularly concerned with relationships between visual practices and the Israeli occupation. He is also the co-director of the Visual Social Media Lab and has a strong interest in the development of methods relevant to the analysis of images circulated on social media. Kevin Foster is the head of the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne. He is the author of Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity (1999), Lost Worlds: Latin America and the Imagining of Empire (2009), and Don’t Mention the War: The Australian Defence Force, the Media and the Afghan Conflict (2013). He edited What Are We Doing in Afghanistan? The Military and the Media at War (2009) and The Information Battlefield: Representing Australians at War (2011). His new book, Anti-Social Media: Conventional Militaries in the Digital Battlespace, will be published in 2021. Des Freedman is Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of Lon- don, and co-director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre. He is the author of The Contradictions of Media Power (Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Politics of Media Policy (Polity, 2008) and co-author (with James Curran and Natalie Fenton) of Misunderstanding the Inter- net (Routledge, 2016). He has edited a number of volumes on broadcasting, media reform, liberalism, terrorism, and the politics of higher education and is one of the founder members and former chair of the UK Media Reform Coalition. Thomas Frissen is Assistant Professor in Digital Technology and Society at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University. His research centres around questions concerning the influences of digital media and technologies in radicalisation, extremism, and terrorism. Specifically, his research aims to advance a better understanding of various ‘dark’ online cul- tures, ranging from Salafi-jihadism, and right-wing extremism, to communities of non-suicidal self-injurious behavior. His current research concentrates on the spread dynamics of (extreme) conspiracy theories, fake news, and memes in the online information ecosystem. Thomas uses a research toolbox that consists of both classical and digital social scientific research methods. Daniel Funke is a staff writer covering online mis- and disinformation for PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize–winning fact-checking website based at the Poynter Institute for Media Stud- ies. He has been writing about fact-checking, technology, misinformation, and politics since 2017, when he joined the International Fact-Checking Network as a reporter. Funke is a former recipient of the Google News Lab Fellowship and has worked for several news outlets in the United States, including the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Atlanta Journal- Constitution. He is a graduate of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. Cherian George is Professor of media studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. He researches media freedom, censorship, and hate propaganda. His 2016 monograph, Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and its Threat to Democracy (MIT Press), was named one of the 100 best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. His other recent books include Media and Power in Southeast Asia (with Gayathry Venkiteswaran; Cambridge University Press, 2019). xvii Contributors His graphic book on cartoon censorship, Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship (with Sonny Liew), will be published by MIT Press in 2021. Eva Haifa Giraud is Senior Lecturer in Media at Keele University, her research focuses on frictions and affinities between non-anthropocentric theories and activist practice. Her mono- graph on these themes, What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism and an Ethics of Exclusion (Duke University Press), was published in 2019 and she has also published articles in journals including Theory, Culture & Society, Social Studies of Science, New Media & Society, and The Sociological Review. She is currently reviews editor for Cultural Politics. Shawn Goh is a research assistant at the Institute of Policy Studies at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media and the internet: specifically in the areas of misin- formation and disinformation, internet governance, digital inclusion, and government com- munications. In 2018, he was invited by the Singapore Parliamentary Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods as an expert witness to present his research on tackling online falsehoods. His recent publications on the topic include a conference paper presented at the 69th annual International Communication Association Conference and a peer-reviewed journal article on governing the information ecosystem in Southeast Asia that was published in Public Integrity in 2019. Lucas Graves is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been at the forefront of research on the global fact-checking movement and is the author of Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact- Checking in American Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2016). His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Nieman Journalism Lab, and many scholarly journals. From 2017 to 2019, he was Senior Research Fellow and acting Research Director at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. Hannah Guy is a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University, examining the role of images in the spread of disinformation on social media. This project is funded through an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Collaborative Doctoral Award and is in part- nership with First Draft. She is also a member of the Visual Social Media Lab, where her cur- rent projects explore images shared on Twitter during the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and digital literacy in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Daniel C. Hallin is Distinguished Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, and is a fellow of the International Communication Association. His books include The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam; “We Keep America on Top of the World”: Televi- sion News and the Public Sphere; Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics; and Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine and Contemporary Life. He is currently doing research on media systems in Latin America. Michael Hameleers (PhD, University of Amsterdam, 2017) is Assistant Professor in Political Communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), Amster- dam, The Netherlands. His research interests include corrective information, disinforma- tion, populism, framing, (affective) polarisation, and the role of social identity in media effects. Jaron Harambam is an interdisciplinary sociologist working on conspiracy theories, (social) media, and AI (content moderation, search/recommender systems). He is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship holder at the Institute for Media Studies (KU L euven, xviii Contributors Belgium) and held a post-doctoral research position at the Institute for Information Law (Uni- versity of Amsterdam). His monograph “Contemporary Conspiracy Culture: Truth and Knowl- edge in an Era of Epistemic Instability” is out at Routledge and won the Best Dissertation 2017–19 Award of the Dutch Sociology Association (NSV). He is editor-in-chief of the open- access Dutch peer-reviewed journal www.TijdschriftSociologie.eu and a member of the Euro- pean network of scholars working on conspiracy theories, COST COMPACT. Alison Harcourt is Professor of Public Policy at the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter. She is also Director of the Centre for European Governance. Alison specialises in regula- tory change in digital markets and is interested in solutions to regulatory problems based around the citizen/consumer and/or civil society voice. She has written on the regulation of traditional and new media markets and internet governance at EU and international levels contributing to the literature on agenda-setting, regulatory competition, soft governance, Europeanisation, and policy convergence. Jonathan Hardy is Professor of Communications and Media at the University of the Arts, London, and teaches media political economy at Goldsmiths College, London. He writes and comments on media industries, media and advertising, communications regulation, and inter- national media systems. His books include Critical Political Economy of the Media (2014), Cross- Media Promotion (2010), and Western Media Systems (2008). He is co-editor of The Advertising Handbook (2018) and series editor of Routledge Critical Advertising Studies. He is a member of the editorial boards of Digital Journalism (Taylor and Francis), Political Economy of Communication, and Triple C: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. George Hawley is Associate Professor of political science at the University of Alabama. His research interests include electoral behaviour, politics and religion, conservatism in the US, and right-wing radicalism. He is the author of six books, including Making Sense of the Alt-Right and Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism. Alfred Hermida (PhD) is Professor at the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia and co-founder of The Conversation Canada. With his more than two decades of experience in digital journalism, his research addresses the transformation of media, emergent news practices, media innovation, social media, and data journalism. He is the author of Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters (Doubleday, 2014), winner of the 2015 National Business Book Award, as well as co-author of Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News (Routledge, 2019) and Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspa- pers (Wiley Blackwell, 2011). Hermida was a BBC TV, radio, and online journalist for 16 years, including 4 in North Africa and the Middle East, before going on to be a founding news editor of the BBC News website in 1997. Karina Horsti (PhD) is a media and migration scholar whose work focuses on refugees, migration, memory, racism, and nationalist populist movements. She is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She works across disciplines and collaborates with artists, activists, and refugees. She has directed multiple research projects, including Post-Truth Public Stories in the Transnational Hybrid Media Space (2017–2018) and two Nordic research networks – Borderscapes, Memory and Migration (2016–2017) and Nordic Research Network for Media, Migration and Society (2007–2010). She is the editor of The Politics of Public Memories of Forced Migration and Bordering in Europe (2019). Rina James is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Arizona, specialising in technology, culture, and inequality. They are currently engaged in two strands of research. xix Contributors The first is concerned with economic impacts of disparities in digital skills; the second focuses on the production and spread of gender-essentialist, anti-feminist ideology on social media. Maria Kyriakidou is Senior Lecturer in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. Her research addresses the relationship between media and globalisation, with a particu- lar focus on the mediation of distant suffering and global crises. She has published work on audience engagement with distant disasters, the media coverage of the Euro crisis, and global media events. Matthew Lease (PhD, Brown University) is Associate Professor and computer scientist in the School of Information and a faculty research associate for the Center for Media Engagement, University of Texas at Austin. His research spans crowdsourcing, information retrieval, and natural language processing. His lab received recent paper awards at the 2019 European Con- ference for Information Retrieval and the 2016 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Human Computation and Crowdsourcing conference. Lease is currently helping lead Good Systems, an eight-year, university-wide Grand Challenge Initiative at UT Austin to design AI technologies that maximally benefit society. Sophie Lecheler is Professor of Political Communication at the Department of Communi- cation Science, University of Vienna. Her research focuses on political journalism, digitalisa- tion of news, emotions, and experimental methods. She previously worked at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) and the LSE’s Department of Government. Her work has been published in a wide range of international journals, such as Political Communica- tion, Political Psychology, Communication Research, Journal of Communication, and New Media & Society. She is currently Associate Editor of the International Journal of Press/Politics and editorial board member of several high-ranking journals. Eun-Ju Lee (PhD Stanford University) is Professor in the Department of Communication at Seoul National University, Republic of Korea. Her research has focused on social cognition and social influence in computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction. She co-edited Media Psychology and is the current editor-in-chief of Human Communication Research. She is an ICA Fellow. Jeremy Levy is a PhD candidate in Northwestern’s Department of Political Science. He studies public opinion, political communications and political psychology, belief systems, and public policy. His current project focuses on conceptual issues in defining misinformation and what this means for our understanding of misinformation prevalence, difficulty in correction, and normative implications. Before coming to Northwestern, he worked at the Urban Institute and received his Masters of Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. Jianing Li is a PhD student and a Knight Scholar of Communications and Civic Renewal the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research centres on misinformation, misperception, and fact-checking in new communica- tion ecologies. Using experimental, computational, and social neuroscience methods, her work examines citizens’ knowledge in contested political and public health issues, psychological and contextual mechanisms contributing to misperceptions, dissemination of and discourse around misinformation in digital media environments, and effective corrective messages that facilitate belief and attitude updating. Gina M. Masullo (PhD, Syracuse University) is the associate director of the Center for Media Engagement and Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the xx Contributors University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on how the digital space both connects and divides people and how that influences society, individuals, and journalism. She is co- editor of Scandal in a Digital Age and author of Online Incivility and Public Debate: Nasty Talk and The New Town Hall: Why We Engage Personally with Politicians, is forthcoming in 2020. Declan McDowell-Naylor is a research associate in the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. His research focuses on digital politics, political communication, science and technology development, and democracy. Alongside Professor Stephen Cushion and Dr Richard Thomas, he is a researcher on the ESRC-funded project titled ‘Beyond the MSM: Understanding the Rise of Alternative Online Political Media’. He has been published in Journalism and contributed chapters to the edited editions of Political Communication in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and A Research Agenda for Digital Poli- tics (Edward Elgar, 2020). Judith Möller is tenured Assistant Professor in political communication at the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. In her research, she focuses on the effects of political communication: in particular, social media and digital media. Bruce Mutsvairo is Professor of Journalism at Auburn University in the US. His research focuses on the development of journalism and democracy in the global South. He is the author/ editor or editor of eight books published by Palgrave Macmillan, Amsterdam University Press, and Rowman and Littlefield. His ninth book, Decolonizing Political Communication in Africa, is due in early 2021 from Routledge. He is a visiting research fellow at the University of Free State in South Africa. Sarah Oates is Professor and Senior Scholar at the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work focuses on political communication and democratisation. Her most recent book, Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere (Oxford University Press), found a faint hope for online mobilisation in Russia. Her current work examines how political messages travel through media ecosystems, including a study of how Russian propaganda narratives gain traction in US media. Michaël Opgenhaffen is Associate Professor at the Institute for Media Studies (KU Leuven, Belgium). He is director of the master’s in journalism programme at the KU Leuven and visiting professor at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. His research focuses on the produc- tion and consumption of social media news. In this context, he studies disinformation on social media platforms. He is co-founder of a fact-checking website in Belgium that uses artificial intelligence to detect fake news. Christian Staal Bruun Overgaard (MSc, University of Southern Denmark) is a Knight Research Associate at the Center for Media Engagement and a doctoral student at the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a BSc and an MSc in economics and business administration from the University of Southern Denmark. His research focuses on the psychological and behavioural effects of news media and the societal and political ramifications of these effects. Reece Peck is Associate Professor at the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. He is the author of Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (Cam- bridge, 2019). His research engages the media dimension of the American political right and specifically examines how conservative news outlets have used tabloid media styles and populist xxi Contributors political rhetoric to reconfigure the meaning of social class in the United States. He also pro- vides commentary on television and politics for news outlets such as the Washington Post, The Columbia Journalism Review and New York Magazine. Elizabeth Poole is Professor of media at Keele University. Her work focuses on the produc- tion, representation, and reception of Muslims in the media, and she has written widely on this subject including Reporting Islam (I. B. Tauris, 2002), Muslims and the News Media (I. B. Tauris, 2006), and Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred (Ashgate, 2013). She has recently been working in the area of digital activism and Islamophobic hate speech online (British Academy, AHRC). She is an executive member of MECCSA, the UK’s Media, Com- munication and Cultural Studies Association. Elliot Ramo is a first-year PhD student at the University of Arizona School of Sociology. They received their Bachelor of Arts degree in 2012 from the University of Mary Washington. Their research agenda intersects law and society, technology, stratification, and power. Elliot is currently using a mixed-methods approach to investigate how online legal research tools (e.g. the Westlaw database) shape legal knowledge. Prior to graduate school, Elliot worked in the insurance and technology sectors as an analyst and project manager. Jeannine E. Relly is Professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Arizona. She holds a courtesy appointment with the School of Government and Public Policy and is affiliated with the university’s Center for Latin American Studies, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Center for Digital Society and Data Studies. Her research focus includes global influences on news media systems. Other research focuses on factors influencing democratic institutions, such as public information access, online disinformation, and various forms of insecurity. She is a research fellow with Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Craig T. Robertson (PhD, Michigan State University) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Craig's research focuses on news audiences, with particular emphasis on audience attitudes and beliefs with respect to journalism, as well as their news consumption behaviors. Key interests are around news trust and credibility, individuals' epistemological beliefs with respect to journalism, audience verification practices, and how people interact with misinformation. Alex Rochefort is a doctoral student in the Division of Emerging Media Studies at Boston University’s College of Communication. His research agenda focuses on platform govern- ance, communication policy, content moderation, and the political uses of misinforma- tion. His 2020 article ‘Regulating Social Media Platforms: A Comparative Policy Analysis’ appeared in Communication Law & Policy. He has also contributed to the 2019 and 2020 editions of Freedom on the Net, a report by Freedom House, where he was a 2019 Google Public Policy Fellow. Susana Salgado (PhD, 2007) is Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, Univer- sity of Lisbon, Portugal. Her most recent publications include the book Mediated Campaigns and Populism in Europe (editor; Palgrave, 2019,) and the articles ‘Never Say Never... Or the Value of Context in Political Communication Research’ (Political Communication, 2019), ‘Interpretive Journalism’ (Oxford Bibliographies in Communication, 2019), and ‘Online Media Impact on Politics: Views on Post-truth Politics and Post-postmodernism’, (International Jour- nal of Media and Cultural Politics, 2018). Susana is PI of the research project Hate: Streams xxii Contributors of Hate and Untruth, funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (PTDC/ CPO-CPO/28495/2017). Tuija Saresma (PhD) is a senior researcher in the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Saresma is a co-director of the research consortium Crossing Borders and is currently working on two projects: Mainstreaming Populism and Crises Redefined. She has published academic and popular texts on affects, hate speech, mobility, pop- ulism, and social media. She is the chair of the Finnish Association of Gender Studies, SUNS; the treasurer of the Association for Cultural Studies; the former chair of the Finnish Associa- tion of Cultural Studies; and the former editor-in-chief of the Finnish Cultural Studies journal Kulttuurintutkimus. Sam Scovill is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. They received their bachelor’s degree from Smith College in 2015. Their research centres around social movements, communication and new technology, and feminist theory. They’ve done projects centred on how news media impacts how young people choose to par- ticipate politically and how perceptions of news media’s impact on people influences movement mobilisation, demobilisation, and countermovement mobilisation. Soo Yun Shin (PhD, Michigan State University) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communicology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research topics include how people process information online to form impressions and make decisions in various contexts, includ- ing social media, e-commerce websites, and virtual teams. Ignacio Siles is Professor of Media and Technology Studies in the School of Communication at the University of Costa Rica. He holds a PhD in media, technology, and society (North- western University) and a master’s degree in communications (Université de Montréal). He is the editor of Democracia en Digital: Facebook, Comunicación y Política en Costa Rica (CICOM, 2020) and the author of A Transnational History of the Internet in Central America, 1985–2000 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Networked Selves: Trajectories of Blogging in the United States and France (Peter Lang, 2017), along with several articles on the relationship between technology, communication, and society. Carol Soon (PhD) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on media regulation, digital inclusion, new media and activism, and public engagement. Her research has been published in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, The Asian Journal of Communication, and Public Integrity. In 2018, she made a written submission to the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods. Carol is also Associate Director of the Asia Journalism Fellowship and the vice chair of Singapore’s Media Literacy Council. In 2012, she received the Australian Endeavour Award. Her paper on political blogging in Singapore won the Best Paper Award at the Conference for E-Democracy and Open Govern- ment in 2013. Natalie Jomini Stroud (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is the founding and current director of the Center for Media Engagement and Professor of Communication studies and journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research on the uses and effects of political news has received numerous national and international awards, including the Outstanding Book Award from the International Communication Association for her book Niche News: The Politics of News Choice. xxiii Contributors Scott R. Stroud (PhD, Temple University) is Associate Professor in the Department of Com- munication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the founding director of the Media Ethics Initiative and the program director of media ethics at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Stroud’s work specialises in the intersec- tion between communication and culture. His books include John Dewey and the Artful Life and Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric. Jane Suiter is Associate Professor in the School of Communications at Dublin City University and director of the Institute for Future Media and Journalism. She is the coordinator of H2020 Provenance on countering disinformation and the Marie Sklodowska Curie project JOLT on advancing digital and data technology for journalism. Edson C. Tandoc Jr. (PhD, University of Missouri) is Associate Professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research focuses on the sociology of message construction in the context of digital journalism. He has conducted studies on the construction of news and social media messages. His studies about influences on journalists have focused on the impact of journalistic roles, new technologies, and audience feedback on the various stages of the news gatekeeping process. This stream of research has led him to study journalism from the perspective of news consumers as well, investigating how readers make sense of critical incidents in journalism and take part in reconsidering journalistic norms and how changing news consumption patterns facilitate the spread of fake news. Richard Thomas is Senior Lecturer in journalism and Programme Director at Swansea University. His research centres on the news coverage of the key issues shaping the twenty- first century, such as politics, elections, inequality, economic growth, and conflict. He has published many articles in leading journals and, with Professor Stephen Cushion, wrote Report- ing Elections: Rethinking the Logic of Campaign Coverage. He is also the co-investigator on the ESRC-funded project titled ‘Beyond the MSM: Understanding the Rise of Alternative Online Political Media’, working alongside Professor Cushion and Dr Declan McDowell-Naylor. Emily Thorson is Assistant Professor of political science at Syracuse University. Emi- ly’s research traces how political information and misinformation reaches citizens (through traditional and new forms of media) and how this information shapes their attitudes and behavior. She co-edited Misinformation and Mass Audiences (University of Texas Press), and her book The Invented State: Systematic Policy Misperceptions in the American Public is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She received a dual PhD in communications and political science at the Annenberg School of Communication and at the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Larissa Tristán is Associate Professor of Media and Social Communication in the School of Communication at the University of Costa Rica (UCR). She has a PhD and a master’s degree in social communication (both from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Catalonia). She is a researcher at the Communication Research Center (CICOM) at UCR and has published articles on dis- course analysis, migration, urban studies, and political communication. Dariya Tsyrenzhapova is a doctoral student in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a current graduate research assistant with the Propaganda Research Team at UT's Center for Media Engagement. Her research focuses on public opinion polarisation, big data, and computational science. Prior to starting her Ph.D., Tsyrenzhapova worked on NPR's Investigations Desk in Washington, D.C., was a Dow Jones Data Fellow at xxiv Contributors the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, and a country manager for the Media Program at the Open Society Foundations (OSF) in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Melissa Tully (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. Her research interests include news literacy, misinformation, civic and political participation, and global media stud- ies. She has published widely in the area of news literacy and perceptions and responses to (mis) information in journals like Mass Communication and Society, Communication Research, Informa- tion, Communication and Society, and Journalism, among others. Cristian Vaccari (PhD, IULM University, Milan, 2006) is Professor of Political Com- munication and Co-director of the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University and a research associate of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University. He studies political communication by elites and citizens in comparative perspective, with a particular focus on digital and social media. He is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Press/Politics and a member of the Committee of Experts on Freedom of Expression and Digital Technologies of the Coun- cil of Europe. Farida Vis is Director of the Visual Social Media Lab (VSML) and Professor of Digital Media at Manchester Metropolitan University. The VSML brings together interdisciplinary researchers from academia and across sectors interested in better understanding social media images. Her academic and data journalism work focuses on developing methods for analysing social media images, the spread of mis- and disinformation online, and developing novel visual media literacy approaches to combat this. She has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Social Media (2013–2016) and the Global Future Council for Information and Entertainment (2016–2019) and is a director at Open Data Manchester. Emily K. Vraga is Associate Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Com- munication at the University of Minnesota, where she holds the Don and Carole Larson Professorship in Health Communication. Her research examines methods to correct health misinformation on social media, to limit biased processing of news content, and to encourage attention to more diverse political content online. Chris Wells is Associate Professor in the Division of Emerging Media Studies and the Depart- ment of Journalism at Boston University. He is a scholar of political communication, currently studying how the attention economy shapes media production and social media sharing, how hybrid media flows create the depictions of politics that citizens experience, and how social and political identity influence individuals’ interpretations of political communications and political engagement. He is the author of The Civic Organization and the Digital Citizen (Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2015) and recipient of the Young Scholar Award from the International Communica- tion Association (2018). Oscar Westlund is Professor at the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Oslo Met- ropolitan University, where he leads the OsloMet Digital Journalism Research Group. He holds secondary appointments at Volda University College and the University of Gothenburg. He is the editor-in-chief of Digital Journalism. He leads The Epistemologies of Digital News Produc- tion, a research project funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences. He is a project member of the international research project Source Criticism and Mediated Disinformation (2020–2024). His most recent book is What Is Digital Journalism Studies? (Rout- ledge, 2020), co-authored with Steen Steensen. xxv Contributors Samuel C. Woolley (PhD, University of Washington) is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies computational propa- ganda: how automated online tools are used to enable both democracy and civic control. He is the author of The Reality Game (PublicAffairs, 2020) and co-editor (with Phil Howard) of Com- putational Propaganda (Oxford, 2018). Woolley is the former director of research of the Com- putational Propaganda Project at Oxford. He is a former Belfer Fellow at the Anti-Defamation League and former research fellow at the German Marshall Fund, Google Jigsaw, and the tech policy lab at the University of Washington. Bilge Yesil is Associate Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island and on the doctoral faculty of Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research interest is in global media and communication, with a particular focus on Turkey and the Middle East, global internet policies, online surveillance, and censorship. She is the author of Video Surveillance: Power and Privacy in Everyday Life (2009) and Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State (2016). Yesil’s current project, Talking Back to the West: Muslim Turkish Voices in the Global Public Sphere, explores Turkey’s global media and communication projects in relation to geopolitics, history, and religion. xxvi INTRODUCTION Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord The premise of this Companion is that recent transformations in the architecture of public com- munication and particular attributes of the digital media ecology are conducive to the kind of polarised, anti-rational, post-fact, post-truth communication championed by populism. The rise of populist parties, politicians, and movements around the world is grounded in multiple causes. It is no coincidence that the resurgence of populism has been taking place alongside new forms of disinformation and misinformation. The purpose of this Companion is to bring together in one volume contemporary analyses of various dimensions of dis/misinformation and populism and to understand the linkages between media and journalistic practices and political processes in different countries and cultures. The relation between populism and mis/disinformation is at the centre of recent research in journalism studies, political communication, and media studies. The guiding question is whether new forms of disinformation and misinformation are connected to populism. Although populism lacks a single definition, we understand it to be a political movement that both reflects the crisis of liberal democracy and challenges core democratic premises, including freedom of the press, freedom of speech, government accountability, and tolerance of difference. While we recognise that the rise of populist parties, politicians, and movements around the world is grounded in multiple causes, our interest in this Companion is exploring whether and how recent transformations in the spaces of public communication and particular attributes of the digital media ecology are conducive to populism. Just as right-wing populism has ascended in many countries in the past years, notably in Brazil, Britain, Hungary, India, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, and the United States, irrationalism in public communication is on the rise too. The latter is represented by post-fact, post-truth communication, as illustrated by the spread of fake information, conspiracy beliefs, and propaganda – issues that have received significant attention and raised justifiable concerns worldwide in recent years. Irrationalism comprises both disinformation and misinformation. Disinformation refers to deliberate attempts to sow confusion and misinformation among the public, with the purpose of political gain by a range of public, private, and social actors. Misinformation alludes to the existence of false information around a range of issues relevant to public life, including political, historical, health, social, and environmental matters, in the public. We believe it is necessary to audit existing knowledge to map out the dynamics of mis/dis- information globally and their linkages to the current ‘populist moment’. While on the surface 1 Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord there seems to be a connection between communication and political trends, it is not imme- diately obvious that dis/misinformation is necessarily conducive to the kind of illiberal politics represented and championed by populism. To flesh out the relationship between developments in public communication and political dynamics, we think it is necessary to understand the multiple dimensions and the new aspects of mis/disinformation; to study the unique aspects of contemporary populism in relation to media, journalism, and public communication; and to examine plausible and demonstrable connections between these developments. In Chapter 1 we attempt, as editors, to highlight and contextualise the key themes, questions, and debates relevant to media, mis/disinformation, and populism. We set the ‘scene’ and map key processes and questions for the Companion. We outline the principal aims and objectives. In conceptual terms, we discuss the intellectual formation of media, misinformation, and populism; defini- tions and models; and introduce key interdisciplinary debates about misinformation and the reporting of various aspects of populism. To explore these issues and the relationship between communication/informational trends and populism, we asked contributors to produce in-depth analyses of key concepts in the lit- erature and to discuss linkages to specific aspects of populist politics, including new empirical work. With this goal in mind, we requested that contributors consider several questions. Are media, disinformation, and populist politics connected; if so, how; and what is the nature of these connections? What specific media changes foster disinformation? What is new about cur- rent forms of disinformation, and how are they linked to political strategies and movements? Finally is populism both a cause and effect of deep transformations in media and information? This introduction explains the rationale for the selection of parts and topics and provides an overview of each chapter. The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism is divided into five parts: Part I Key Concepts Part II Media Misinformation and Disinformation Part III The Politics of Misinformation and Disinformation Part IV Media and Populism Part V Responses to Misinformation, Disinformation and Populism Key concepts (Part I) The first part of the Companion comprises chapters on key concepts in the study of misinfor- mation, disinformation and populism. They provide important and valuable insights for build- ing and refining theory in these areas. Misinformation, disinformation and populism are rich subjects of inquiry in many disciplines, and the place of media provides an opportunity both to examine and to deploy broad concepts and theories to understand the dynamics between them. Carlos de la Torre (Chapter 2) opens this part by asking ‘What do we mean by populism?’ He identifies four conceptualisations which are prominent nowadays: namely, a set of ideas, a politi- cal strategy, a political style, and a political logic. He traces the history of the way sociologists and historians have adopted both the concept and the ideal types with accompanying attributes. He discusses the strategies used by populists to gain and maintain power and then examines their use and abuse of media, demonstrating how some populist leaders are media innova- tors. Rachel Armitage and Cristian Vaccari (Chapter 3) provide an insight into media use by populists and others by presenting an overview of the main debates about misinformation and disinformation within a political communication context. They demonstrate how mis/disin- formation has gained prominence in public discourse, together with the denigration of experts 2 Introduction and independent journalists; all this at the expense of evidence-based debate and a subsequent decline in trust of the mainstream media and news organisations. All these developments have been accelerated by social media. They presage the chapters in Part V of the Companion by briefly discussing some of the possible solutions to counteract the phenomena of mis/disinfor- mation. Daniel C. Hallin (Chapter 4) continues the theme of populist leaders use of the media. He argues that mediatisation requires a rethink as contemporary mediatised populist politics as exhibited by Donald Trump does not fit well into the traditional narrative about the mediatisa- tion of politics. Hallin argues that we need to think comparatively about its varying, changing forms. He concludes the chapter by providing five points regarding the reconceptualisation of mediatisation. Jonathan Hardy (Chapter 5) analyses how misinformation provides what he terms ‘a form of stress testing of media systems analysis’. He focuses on nation-centrism, digital communications, and normativity, all elements in questioning features of ‘system-ness’ as areas of critique most relevant to the analysis of misinformation. Hardy shows how misinformation poses various challenges to media systems analysis: namely, ‘the handling of transnational and transcultural, the range and complexity of digital communications, the multiplicity of actors and processes’. Sarah Oates (Chapter 6) examines how another ‘old’ concept – in this case, propaganda – can be located in the digital age. She shows ‘how the democratizing effect of online information to create informed citizens is outmatched by the internet’s ability to leverage misinformation in the service of populist propaganda’. Using the cases of Trump’s election and Russian inter- ference in the campaign, Oates argues that free speech and fairness are put at a disadvantage in the online ‘rewired’ propaganda war, giving populist actors more success than traditional political parties. Cherian George (Chapter 7) maintains the propaganda theme by analysing the use of hate propaganda. He shows how hate studies have a long pedigree and hate propaganda, sometimes called hate speech, has been around a lot longer ‘than the digitally-assisted misin- formation that has triggered concern in recent years’. Hate propagandists, whether repressive governments or organised hate groups, are able to dodge attempts at censorship and regulation on social media, thereby stifling the voices of their ideological enemies. He argues that it is important to understand (and, therefore, to counter the fact) that hate campaigns are layered, distributed, and strategic. Judith Moller (Chapter 8) traces the history and meaning of the terms filter bubble and echo chamber, emphasising that the concepts describe a state rather than a process. While both are described as enclosed spaces, ‘the metaphor of the echo chamber focuses on the nature of what is inside this space while the metaphor of the filter bubbles emphasises what constitutes its boundaries: the filtering algorithms’. Moller illustrates the mismatch of theoreti- cal and empirical research on these subjects, suggesting this may be due to the lack of norma- tive research and hence pointing to directions for future research. Susana Salgado (Chapter 9) assesses the major conceptual debates regarding post-truth politics. By interpreting post-truth politics in the context of post-post-modernism, she shows how populism reshapes boundaries in political discourse. In contrast digital media and technologies create favourable conditions for the spread of all kinds of alternative narratives. To combat mis/disinformation Salgado calls for action to ensure social media are compatible with democratic values. The theme of post-truth is continued by Edson C. Tandoc (Chapter 10), who looks at the phenomenon of fake news. He shows how its resurgence as a term arose in the 2016 US presidential election, with subsequent scholarly attention. There are two main components of the term defined in communication studies – namely, the level of facticity and the main intention behind the message. Whilst fake news may be categorised as a form of disinformation, its subsequent spread via social media may be unintentional. Whilst fake news can spread like a virus and continue to evolve, the means to counteract it becomes ever more difficult. 3 Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord Media misinformation and disinformation (Part II) The chapters in this part analyse the role of media and journalism platforms in misinformation and disinformation. They examine the way digital technologies have introduced new forms for the expression of misinformation and populist discourse. Dariya Tsyrenzhapova and Samuel C. Woolley (Chapter 11) open this part by examining the digital interference by Russia in the 2016 US presidential election to analyse computational propaganda campaigns on social media. They draw on the literatures from propaganda studies, reflexive control theory, and information diffusion to conceptualise how false news messages, constructed with the specific intention to engender social disagreement, can be utilised in order to mobilise social movements around the world. Johanna Dunaway (Chapter 12) shows how some of the key concepts discussed in Part 1 of the Companion – echo chambers, filter bubbles – are sometimes blamed for polarisation in the era of post-truth. In reviewing the literature, she posits the argument that ‘cognitive biases, affective polarisation, and sorting are as much to blame for susceptibility to misinformation and the development of misperceptions’ rather than the media and information environment facili- tating the dissemination and exposure of misinformation. Dunaway goes on to say that research on misinformation should concentrate on looking at the conditions under which the exposure to misinformation occurs and with what effects. The focus on the epistemology and practice of data journalism is the subject discussed by Oscar Westlund and Alfred Hermida (Chapter 13). They show how data is political – affecting its collection; its availability; the choice of who is included and excluded; and the way it is processed, analysed, and presented. Despite these shortcomings in the data, Westlund and Hermida point out the flaws by showing how journal- ists repeatedly make authoritative and definitive knowledge claims, instead of indicating the level of credibility present in the data. In the following chapter (14), George Hawley examines the major forms of alt-right media and outlines how the alt-right differed from earlier iterations of the white nationalist movement. He argues that over its relatively short history, the alt-right has relied on different forms of online media to disseminate its message and has effectively used social media to spread its content to a wider audience. In this regard podcasts are an especially important medium for the alt-right. The phenomenon of Fox News is the subject discussed by Reece Peck (Chapter 15). He argues that the resonance of Fox News lies in the populist style of television news that the network innovated rather than an attraction to its conservative ideologi- cal orientation as many scholars have posited. Peck explains the components of Fox’s populist epistemological framework, arguing that Fox’s challenge to expert knowledge and technocratic authority is not simply tied to a profit motive but is a representational choice that is directly connected to Fox’s larger populist branding strategy, which interlocks with and is reflective of the ongoing hegemonic project of the American post-war conservative movement. Declan McDowell-Naylor, Richard Thomas, and Stephen Cushion in Chapter 16 take a contrasting look away from Fox by looking at alternative online political media (AOPM) and asking whether it challenges or exacerbates populism and mis/disinformation or represents just a continuation of partisan news. They discuss whether AOPM provides a corrective role to the mainstream media and remain ambiguous as to whether there is conclusive empirical evidence to link AOPM with contributing to or challenging mis/disinformation or, indeed, contributing to support populist politics. The possible threat from AOPM to the public sphere is left tantalis- ingly open to future research. Jeannine E. Relly (Chapter 17) is in no doubt about the dangers to the public sphere of online harassment of journalists coming as a direct consequence of populism, mis/disinformation, and impunity. She shows how populist governments frequently disparage news coverage and encourage social media users to attack journalists, particularly women reporters. Anonymous online abusers unleash bots and troll armies to harass and spread 4 Introduction disinformation about journalists that inevitably puts them in danger. Around the world, impu- nity becomes the norm when journalists are killed, populist leaders encourage or create a fertile environment for the attacks, and perpetrators cannot be identified to redress online attackers. Lucas Graves (Chapter 18) uses the questions raised by the ‘infodemic’ of fake news as a plat- form to articulate several heuristics for thinking about how mediated misinformation matters in public life today – namely, that there’s no such thing as ‘online misinformation’. Misinformation (like information) works by allusion, not reason. Misinformation is an index of political incen- tive structures; just don’t call it an echo chamber. Each of these reminders is based on gaps or caveats that are often acknowledged, though only rarely addressed, in the growing literature on misinformation. Taken together, he argues, they may help illuminate new priorities for scholars working in this area. Considering how much of both social media and manipulated content is visual, Simon Faulkner, Hannah Guy, and Farida Vis (Chapter 19), in the final piece of Part II, argue that analysing the role of news images may be a better way to understand misinformation and disinformation. Images and photographs are predominantly examined through a journalis- tic lens, with a focus on verifying whether an image is ‘true’ or ‘false’, whereas Faulkner, Guy, and Vis consider the socio-political context, which they say is fundamental to comprehending how images maybe used for mis/disinformation purposes. The politics of misinformation and disinformation (Part III) The chapters in Part III analyse the politics of misinformation by examining transformations in public communication: namely, facticity and deception in relation to a range of contemporary topics and public debates. Many of the chapters define the problems of mis/disinformation and its misperceptions, discuss the causes, and then review potential antidotes. In the opening piece, Sarah Banet-Weiser (Chapter 20) analyses the relationship between misinformation and misogyny and shows how misogyny is often at the core of misinformation campaigns in which women become direct targets of attack. She argues that misogynistic information is similar to racism in being profitable for search engines as they both generate large amounts of web traffic. ‘Misogynistic misinformation campaigns do not represent a disruption or a crisis in everyday lives; rather, they represent the centrality and normalization of misogyny as a central part of that everyday life’. Eileen Culloty and Jane Suiter (Chapter 21) show how anti-immigrant disinformation has a long and worldwide history and how a diverse network of actors push anti-immigrant disinformation, bolstering and promoting anti-immigrant attitudes among the wider public. They argue that anti-immigrant disinformation can be viewed as part of a culture war in which an increasing transnational matrix of far-right, alt-right, populist, and conservative groups reinforce a common opposition to a pluralist worldview. Jeremy Levy, Robin Bayes, Toby Bolsen, and Jamie Druckman (Chapter 22) summarise the research on scientific mis/disinformation and the challenges this poses for science communicators seeking to disseminate knowledge and for the implementation of government policies. They argue that the politicisation of science results in public distrust of scientific evidence and conspirato- rial thinking (see also Chapters 28 and 29), especially when consensus information contradicts existing beliefs or positions on an issue. They show the possible corrections to misinformation and science politicisation, in order to enhance the positive impact that science can have on societies. The following two chapters examine the ways in which governments and the military use disinformation to enhance their policies. Rhys Crilley and Precious N. Chatterje-Doody (Chapter 23) trace the recent historical development and thinking around government mis/ disinformation in war and its connection with the development of new communication 5 Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord technologies such as the printing press, photography, cinema, television, the internet, and social media. They argue that new developments allow states to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of news and information. Crilley and Chatterje-Doody also show how concepts of propaganda, framing and strategic narratives, and discourse can be adopted to comprehend government disinformation during conflict. Kevin Foster (Chapter 24) discusses the changes in military disinformation from the second world war to the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Strategies have constantly changed in response to previous conflicts. Lessons supposedly learned are found wanting when new media developments scupper tactics previously deployed. Foster shows how disinformation is a key weapon used by the military and governments not only to fight their adversaries but also to win over and maintain the hearts and minds of their domestic audiences. Thomas Frissen, Leen d’Haenens, and Michaël Opgenhaffen (Chapter 25) provide an overview of research on information disorders (e.g. fake news and conspiracy theories – see also Chapters 10 and 28) and examine how extreme right actors have weaponised disinforma- tion. They reflect upon and conceptually develop how the media ecosystem is instrumentalised by examining both social contagion and the algorithmic architecture of online communities that spread and mainstream their extreme-right worldviews, including those on anti-Semitism and white supremacy. The theme of information disorder is taken up by Svetlana Bodrunova (Chapter 26). Using propaganda as a case study, she examines the practices implemented in and by contemporary Russia. She argues that the practices are multi-faceted, with systemic misinformation targeted at internal audiences for populist purposes and outside Russia for international policy goals. These duel goals are a reflection of the complexities of the Russian media ecosystem, where troll activity and misinformation via mainstream media operate for both internal and external audiences. Jennifer Earl, Rina James, Elliot Ramo, and Sam Scovill (Chapter 27) show how social movements and protest have a long relationship with misinfor- mation and disinformation, tracing them back to early theories of collective behaviour and pointing out the changes in the prevalence, patterns of production, spread, and consumption. They introduce five theoretical lenses for false information and social movements – false infor- mation as movement catalyst, disinformation and propaganda as repressive tools, false informa- tion as a weaponisation of free speech, false information as a commodity, and misinformation resulting from journalistic norms applied to protest. Jaron Harambam (Chapter 28) poses the question of whether conspiracy theories are the result of a misinformed public or one wittingly believing false information. He asks how they are circulated in the media eco-system and why people follow forms of information often embraced by populists – distrust of institutions, distrust of knowledge/official truth, worldview/ ideology. Who are the people who share and endorse these ideas? And should something be done to counter them – is debunking necessary? (See also Chapter 42.) Research on conspiracy theories is mostly rather serious business. It features the causes and consequences of a cultural phenomenon that is generally regarded a societal problem, and hence focuses too much on its dangers. This, he argues, obscures the affective and playful dimensions that are just as much part of conspiracy theories and points to this as a possible direction for future research. Conspiracy theory is one of the themes touched on by Catherine Baker and Andrew Chadwick (Chap- ter 29). They examine post-truth identities online by providing a conceptual framework for empirical research on the ideology of post-truth movements such as anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers, and involuntary celibates. They argue that while cognitive biases, conspiracy mentalities, and the decline of trust in institutions are important roots of post-truth identities, digital and social media have played a role in enabling the construction and visibility of these identities and have made it easier for their adherents to connect with each other and sustain their knowledge, norms, and values. The final piece in Part III looks at the consumption of mis/disinformation. 6 Introduction Sophie Lecheler and Jana Egelhofer (Chapter 30) identify two dimensions of the consumption of misinformation and disinformation: namely, ‘real’ and ‘perceived’. The first is the result of the consequences of the consumption of misinformation for citizen attitudes, behaviors, and emotions in various contexts. The second concerns public worries about a ‘disinformation crisis’ causing widespread perceived consumption effects. Citizens are concerned about being manipulated by what they perceive as disinformation. Consequently, they change their news media diet. This perceived consumption effect is aided by frequent uses of the ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’ labels by populist politicians when describing legacy news media. Media and populism (Part IV) Part IV presents a selection of studies that explore the linkages between media and populism around news coverage of particular political events in different contexts. How do the news media report within a populist milieu in different cultures, and how accurate and consistent is the coverage? The part begins with Bruce Mutsvairo and Susana Salgado (Chapter 31), who look at the rise of populism in Africa, highlighting its initial linkages to anti-colonial politics and its later manifestation as a response to governments that had become detached from the popula- tion. They examine four cases in which political leaders have emerged using populist rhetoric and the discourse of the logic of the enemy of the people to gain power. This is often followed by creating or maintaining repressive media laws and regulations to dispel dissent and counter alternative voices who may threaten their power and status. The focus shifts to North America, where Chris Wells and Alex Rochefort (Chapter 32) demonstrate that the tendencies towards populism and susceptibility to misinformation are long-standing characteristic aspects of Ameri- can political culture. They show that the US is especially susceptible to populist currents. It assumes prominence in contexts in which democratic legitimacy is called into question. The growth in social media in relentlessly re-articulating underlying resentments and supplying end- less resentful interpretations of current events is a permutation of misinformation the US has not seen before, and, they argue, it poses a grave threat to democratic culture. Ignacio Siles, Larissa Tristán, and Carolina Carazo (Chapter 33) examine the role of social media platforms in shaping populism and issues of misinformation in Latin America. They argue that a consideration of the ‘elective affinity’ between post-truth and populism in the case of Latin America requires assess- ing the significance of religion and its associated forms of polarisation and messianic authority. Framing religion helps explain the particular manifestations that this link has acquired in Latin America over the past years. Recent presidential campaigns in various countries show how this tripartite affinity has manifested in the parallel dissemination of particular kinds of content, served as a platform for the rise of populist political/religious figures, and shaped the outcome of electoral processes. The following three chapters look at the media and populism in Europe. Michael Ham- eleers and Claes deVreese (Chapter 34) provide a conceptualisation and evidence from a study of ten European countries. They argue that it is crucial to explore the extent to which news consumers actually trust the media and whether they perceive a crisis of accuracy and honesty in the news to which they are exposed. Mis/disinformation may thus correspond to societal developments beyond the lack of facticity and honesty of information and can spill over into demand-side evaluations of the media’s accuracy and honesty. From their analysis, they con- firm that most citizens can distinguish misinformation from disinformation. However, there is strong between-country variation, with news consumers in Western and Northern European countries more likely to trust the accuracy of journalistic reporting and less likely to doubt the honesty of the media elites. In contrast citizens in Eastern and Southern European countries 7 Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord are more likely to have strong perceptions of mis- and disinformation. Karina Horsti and Tuija Saresma (Chapter 35), using the case of Finland, examine the role of social media in the emergence of a right-wing populist movement and its transformation into a political force. They emphasise how the new multi-platform media ecology, together with its decentralised anonymous online spaces, enables political mobilisation to flourish as a precursor to electoral success for right-wing populist parties. Alongside this media system of ‘connectivities’, the emergence of transnationally widely spread ideologies of Islamophobia and misogyny (see also Chapters 19, 20, and 21) helps to cement the populist movement. In a similar vein, Bilge Yesil (Chapter 36) considers Turkey as a case study to explore the linkages between the structural conditions of the Turkish media system and the governing Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) manipulation of social media through the proliferating of falsehoods and conspiracies. She shows how social media, like the mainstream media, is partisan and polarised as groups affiliated with the AKP harass and silence dissent on Twitter and Facebook, overwhelming these sites with government narratives. The ruling party’s digital surveillance schemes and heavy use of legal provisions to prosecute its critics make social media sites especially vulnerable to the effects mis/disinformation campaigns. The possibility of Turkey joining the European Union became an important disinformation issue in the United Kingdom Brexit referendum. Glenda Cooper (Chapter 37) examines how populist rhetoric and media manipulation was incorporated into the 2016 campaign. Whilst research on referenda is very limited, with an emphasis on whether the media reporting is balanced and fair, she argues that if news media follow the populist narrative, even while challenging and debunking misinformation, this can end up shaping public reaction. Turkey became a useful conduit to combine EU migration and the refugee crisis in voters’ minds. The Leave campaign’s use of populist rhetoric, unchal- lenged for many years, combined with misinformation, managed to overcome the supposed advantage of Remain. Des Freedman (Chapter 38) reflects on the implication for media systems of conceptions of populism as a threat to reason and social order as well as to consensual and ‘objective’ journal- ism. He argues that from the perspective of traditional liberal democratic politics, populism and its mediated forms can be seen as examples of ‘policy failure’, four of which he identifies: namely, failure to tackle concentrated ownership, to regulate tech companies, to safeguard an effective fourth estate, and to nurture independent public service media. He concludes that existing liberal democratic approaches to media policy have fostered highly unequal and dis- torted communication systems that have been exploited by forces on the far right. In the final piece in this part, William H. Dutton and Craig T. Robertson (Chapter 39) present the results of their surveys of internet users in seven developed nations indicating that populism is indeed prominent as conventionally defined, making it difficult to view these beliefs as extreme in the contemporary digital age. Interestingly they find that those who hold populist attitudes are no more likely to be trapped in filter bubbles or echo chambers than are other internet users. Instead, they are more politically engaged and actively seek out sources of information about politics. The results lead Dutton and Robertson to speculate on alternative perspectives on populism, such as the rise of a sense of citizen empowerment and the polarisation of political communication in the digital age. Responses to misinformation, disinformation and populism (Part V) Part V looks at the responses to misinformation and disinformation, particularly in areas of freedom of speech, human rights, and the diminishing of public trust and journalistic 8 Introduction legitimacy and authority. It examines political and social efforts to address the causes and the consequences of mis/disinformation, through mitigating the effects of fake news and other inaccuracies. The first three pieces in this part examine legal and regulatory responses to mis/dis- information. Alison Harcourt (Chapter 40) explains the current legislative response by the European Union whilst also examining case studies on the UK’s, Germany’s, and France’s responses. Germany introduced a law in 2017 which polices social media web- sites following a number of high-profile national court cases concerning fake news and the spread of racist material. France passed a law in 2018 which similarly obliges social media networks to take down content upon request from a judge. The UK took a more self-regulative approach after a UK Commons committee investigation into fake news (2017) concluded that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg failed to show ‘leadership or personal responsibility’ over fake news. Daniel Funke (Chapter 41) follows Alison Harcourt’s analy- sis of the EU by looking at worldwide actions in restricting the flow of falsehoods on the internet,

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