News on fake news

Abstract

This article presents a qualitative study of media discourses around fake news, examining 288 news articles from two national elections in Denmark in 2019. It explores how news media construct fake news as a national security threat and how journalists articulate their own role in relation to this threat. The study draws on discourse theory and the concept of logics to critically map how particular meaning ascriptions and subject positions come to dominate over others, finding five logics undergirding media discourses: (1) a logic of anticipation; (2) a logic of exteriorisation; (3) a logic of technologisation; (4) a logic of securitisation; and (5) a logic of pre-legitimation. The article concludes that fake news is constructed as an ‘ultimate other’ in Danish media discourses, potentially contributing to blind spots in both public perception and political solutions. This resonates with previous studies from other geo-political contexts, calling for further cross-national research.