Fake News as a Critical Incident in Journalism

ABSTRACT

This study examines how American newspapers made sense of the issue of fake news. By analysing newspaper editorials and considering the problem of fake news as a critical incident confronting journalism, this study found that news organizations in the US recognize fake news as a social problem while acknowledging the challenge in defining it. They generally considered fake news as a social media phenomenon thriving on political polarization driven by mostly ideological, but sometimes also financial, motivations. Therefore, they assigned blame for the rise of fake news to the current political environment, to technological platforms Google and Facebook, and to audiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Boundary work
• critical incident
• editorials
• fake news
• journalism
• social media

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Lim Wenliang Darren and Muhammad Syafiq Bin Muhammad Shahiddin who helped in finding, collecting, and sorting the sample of editorial articles for this study. They were undergraduate students at Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU) at the time of data collection and took part in the university’s Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) program.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.