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Home , News broadcasting

THE PHENOMENON

History, Distribution & Aesthetics

Merlin van Schaik

Studentnr: 10190465 Supervisor: dhr. dr. T. Pape Date: 26 June 2017 [email protected] 2nd Reader: dhr. dr. J.A. Teurlings Master Thesis & Cross - Number of words: University of Amsterdam 22320

Table of Contents

Introduction 4

1. Traditional News 6 1.1 The Penny Press 6 1.2 versus Story 9 1.3 and Television Take the Lead 10

2. Exploring the Boundaries of 15 2.1 Moving Away from Facts 16 2.1.1 The 24-hour News Cycle 16 2.1.2 The Blur between News and Entertainment 18 2.2 The Digitization of the News 21 2.2.1 and News 23 2.3 The Outcome: The Decline of ‘Traditional Journalism’ 25 2.3.1 Made its Entrance 27

3. The Distribution of Fake News 30 3.1 Newsfeed 30 3.2 Click-Bait 32 3.3 Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers 34

4. The Aesthetics of Fake News 38 4.1 ABC News 38 4.1.1 Graphic Design 39 4.1.2 Rhetoric and Style 42

2 5. The Solutions 49 5.1 The Online Solutions 49 5.2 The Government Interferes 51 5.3 are Fighting Back 52

Conclusion 54

References 57

3

Introduction

In 2016, “Post-truth” became the English Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year. A word that reflects on a world where objective facts have become less influential when it comes to news. Emotions are important in shaping public opinion, creating an environment in which lies and falsehoods appear more often (English Oxford Dictionaries n.pag.). News that should be impartial, objective and fact-based, now turns out to be biased and sometimes even fabricated (Newman 2017: 3). This spread of false and misleading information has become a huge problem in the last few years. During the 2016 elections in the United States, fake news turned into a trending topic when false stories about both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were spread via social media. The increase of fake content has caused much concern in society, as researchers suggest the influence of fake news on the political environment of the country. The scholar, Lisa Ellen Silvestri, stresses the impact of what fake news has on contemporary society. “Today facts and evidence lose truth-value as digital misinformation, ‘fake news,’ or ‘,’ drown out veracity in public discourse” (Silvestri n.pag.). As untrue information is spread by the creators of fake news stories, the trust in journalism is decreasing. This results in a post-truth era, an era in which the distribution of false and misleading information has led to an situation in which many people don’t know what story to believe anymore. Society has changed into a world where it is harder to determine the truth; facts become less important than the representation of images, and feeling has become an important when it comes to news reporting. The misleading effect of fake news stories is of great concern all over the world. Many fake news stories were spread during the 2016 US elections, the Brexit-campaign, the Ukraine referendum, and the 2017 elections in France. With the upcoming elections in the United Kingdom and in , the media and politicians are warning the public about the spread of fake stories as some of the producers of these stories will try to influence the politics in those countries. Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is often linked to the phenomenon of fake news. Through his spreading of falsehoods and lies via social media and the news, he sells the idea that the truth has become irrelevant. With Trump as an important figure in the discussion on fake news and the fact that many fake news stories have a subject-matter that is related to events in the United States, the focus of this research will be on the phenomenon of fake news within the context of the United States. And though this focus may not do full justice to the numerous fake news ecologies that operate internationally, fake news has had such an

4 unignorable impact in the United States, that it will be a good example and starting point in this research. This paper analyses the phenomenon of fake news, exploring how fake news works and its influence on contemporary society. Questions regarding the conditions that enable the rise of fake news will be explored and answered. What are the historical conditions that first created an environment in which fake news could grow? How is fake news distributed? What are the aesthetical characteristics of fake news? And what are the possible solutions for the problem of fake news? These questions will be answered by using a method of historical research in the field of media history in combination with an in-depth analysis of the distribution and close analysis of the aesthetical characteristics of the phenomenon. The phenomenon of fake news will be analysed by focussing on the historical conditions, the distribution, the aesthetical characteristics and the possible solutions. The goal of this research is to offer a theoretical background in which to frame the debate on fake news and provide an analysis of how fake news works. This theoretical framework starts with a historical overview of the formation of journalistic standards in order to explain how journalism was first built on the values of objectivity and fact. The first chapter introduces how the journalistic standards arose in the 19th century, followed by the most important media, technological and journalistic developments that had an influence on the reporting of the news. The second chapter explores how these journalistic standards began to change within each news medium. How the acceleration of the news on television and the blur between information and entertainment influenced the journalistic values and how the arrival of the changed the journalistic profession even more. The goal of this chapter is to show how the world of journalism transformed into an environment where fake news could easily gain a major role. After the historical outline, a more detailed analysis of the phenomenon of fake news will be given. The third chapter discusses the question of how fake news is spread on the Internet. The distribution of fake news via social media platforms is analysed and connected to the dangers that emerge from the spread of fake news. The fourth chapter focuses on the aesthetical characteristics of the fake news stories. Explaining how journalism changed into an emotion- based profession that focuses only on the preferences of the . In this chapter, a side by side analysis of a and a ‘real’ news website is performed, in order to realise to what extent fake news mimics the aesthetics of ‘real’ news. To complete the research into the phenomenon of fake news, the last chapter will propose possible solutions to the problem. Discussing the solutions made by the online environment, political solutions and the reaction of the journalistic field. This chapter will explore the solutions from a more international point of view, as fake news has become a worldwide problem that must be solved.

5 1

Traditional News

Truth, accuracy, independence, fairness, impartiality, humanity and accountability are the seven key principles of journalism. According to current debates about the phenomenon fake news, these journalistic standards are being threatened. When fact-based journalism is exposed to false and misleading news stories, the question about “what is news” is coming up. When answering the question whether or not something can be seen as news it is important to first explore and explain what news is and how the ethics, standards and values arose in the journalistic field. The first steps towards the rise of the journalistic standards were taken at the beginning of the 19th century. The penny papers can be seen as the starting point of this historical research on the ideals of journalism because this period can be emphasised as the period in which the foundations for the journalistic standards were made (Schudson 60, Roggenkamp 2). Later on, with the arrival of around 1890, the journalistic standards were further built into the model as we know it today (Roggenkamp xii – xiii). Within this period journalism formed itself as the producers and distributors of news that became available for the masses. Giving them both information and entertainment. The second transformation that formed journalism was the arrival of the mediums radio and television. Those mediums made the news available for an even wider audience, providing them with a higher amount of information, sound, and images. Something that made the news a more sense-based experience, as the people were able to hear and see the news through their radio stations and . Focussing on these developments in the environment of journalism, this chapter tries to make sense of how news can be understood within the broader forces that shaped the production of journalism. So, in order to understand the structures that shape contemporary journalism, it is necessary to trace back the most important transformations journalism has gone through, working towards journalism practices as we know them now.

1.1 The Penny Press

The penny papers expressed and built the culture of a democratic market society, a culture that had no place for social or intellectual deference. This was the groundwork on which a belief in facts and a distrust of the reality, or objectivity, of “values” could thrive (Schudson 60).

6 Journalism that became available for the masses started with the arrival of the penny press. Michael Emery and Edwin Emery argue in their book The Press and America: An Interpretative History of the that the penny paper came out in 1833 can be seen as the first made in the United States for the common man (121). Compared to the existing papers this new paper was significantly cheaper - as the name suggests the paper was sold for a penny - therefore the common people could afford to buy the newspaper. The commercial and party papers that were produced before the penny press were sold for six cents an issue. Counting that the wages of the common man at that time was around 58 cents a day, these were too expensive for the common man and only available for the elites. Besides, the newspapers could not be bought per issue, they were sold only by subscription, making it even harder for the common man to buy newspapers (Schudson 15). Roggenkamp describes the penny papers as follows:

Fueled by new printing technologies and increasing literacy rates, the number of newspapers published in the middle decades of the nineteenth-century skyrocket. Shrewd newspaper editors recognised the untapped market of an urban readership and catered to the needs of this audience by selling exciting newspapers for one penny, thereby undercutting the efforts of older, more conservative, six-cent newspapers (1).

Thus, the penny papers was a paper that focused on reaching a wider and more diverse audience, through selling newspapers that were easy to read and financially accessible for everyone (Garcia 44). This growth on the economic and social level of the common man, can be connected to the period in which Andrew Jackson was elected president (Emery and Emery 121, Schudson 43). When Andrew Jackson in 1828 was elected president, he presented himself as the president who cares about the ‘normal’ people. In this Jacksonian era, the labour class began to gain recognition and got finally noticed by the leading government, resulting in more influence on politics with their right to vote (Emery and Emery 121). “They argue that Jackson’s policies implemented this creed and that a democratic wave swept the country in the form of manhood, suffrage, informal manners, a cheap press, public schooling, and the advance of the religious sects most democratic in their governance” (Schudson 43). Within this democracy, people started to think differently about their role in government. The celebration of the individual became more important (Garcia 41). This new form of journalism was built on the communication with the masses, publishing stories that were interesting for a large segment of society and not for only a small target group (Emery and Emery 122). Keeler, Brown and Tarpley, describe this extending of the market, when arguing about the commercialization of the newspapers. They argue that the editors changed view on newspapers from a more political-oriented view towards a commercial perspective. This

7 resulted in a change of the newspaper content. The New York Sun was one of the first penny papers that became widely successful. This paper, together with some other successful penny papers created a new form of journalism. The content in the papers was not based on the affairs of the elites, but on the activities of the whole society (Schudson 22-23). According to Keeler, Brown and Tarpley, objectivity started to make its entrance. “Objective reporting became more valued than editorial opinion and personal biases. Readers began to demand news stories that presented all sides of an issue and content that met their personal needs” (46). Examples of stories were court proceedings, police news, and human-interest stories. Bruce J. Evensen shares this opinion and argues that new techniques of interviewing and fact-finding were the first steps towards journalism techniques that later on would serve objectivity (261). According Hazel Dicken-Garcia argues that the papers started to focus more on the reporting of events instead of only presenting political views. Categories as , crime and were added to the newspapers (42). From this moment on entertainment would also have a role in the newspaper next to the other news topics. Another aspect of the commercialization of the newspapers was the interest of advertisers. The Sun and other comparable newspapers demonstrated that providing the people with news via the newspapers they developed was a valuable commodity. This commodity attracted the interest of other parties, like advertisers. Advertisers saw new possibilities in this mass circulation of the newspaper. The advertisements they first made for the old newspapers, now would reach a more expansive audience (Emery and Emery 122). The penny press can be seen as the first step in setting the standards of journalism. Developing a new form of journalism that not only reports about politics, but also focuses on personal interest and events. Norma Green describes concise the characteristics of the penny press:

The penny press, fueled by revenue and street , was part of a continuous cycle of urban commerce dating from the 1830s. (…) They attempted to build a news habit among impulse buyers with multiple daily editions that updated the front page with fresh headlines, episodic stories, and often new illustrations throughout the day (35).

With this new news habit, journalism was moving towards a more structured environment of standards and ethics. However, the penny press did not yet articulate the ideal of journalism that is common now. According to Schudson, it would take until the end of the 19th century until the ideals of professional journalism could be identified (60). The next part will explore the development of the ideals at the end of the 19th century, exploring the further standardisations of journalism.

8 1.2 Information versus Story

The next important change in the journalistic environment came in the 1890s. In this period news moved from event-based news, towards story-based news. The most important role of the news was to deliver an ‘interesting’, and ‘sensational’ story to the reader (Garcia 89, 229). This new form of journalism is referred to as ‘New Journalism’, the journalism that focused more on the delivery of daily news in an editorial style. Entertaining features as scoops and gossip characterised the news (Keeler, Brown and Tarpley 49). “The Real” as a concept, played an important role at the end of the nineteenth-century. Roggenkamp argues that the ideal of presenting the real, was something that echoed through the years at the end of this century (20). Reporting the reality of an event was an important occupational ideal, however, in the changing years in the 1890s, journalism split itself into two different directions (Schudson 88-89, Roggenkamp 21). “Story” and “information”, where the telling of a story focuses more on the aesthetic function of the newspaper and the information category concentrates on the delivery of pure information, based on unframed facts (Schudson 89). Trying to explore the emergence of the standards of contemporary journalism, this development into two different ways of presenting the news is interesting. Seeing already a division between ‘real’ news and entertaining news. This division developed itself further during the following years, where on the one hand facts became more and more important, followed up by papers that tried to entertain the public. New journalism had a different way of presenting the news. Journalists would take their role as reporters seriously and immersed themselves into the events, to get the best and most truthful story. This focus on delivering the truth to the people arose after World War I. The production of the news fundamentally changed by the 1890s and early 1900. Within this period, the news shifted towards a more objective, rational and information form of presenting the news (Ryfe 72). During World War I a lot of was used in the news, so when the war was over the desire for fact increased. The rise of objective reporting was thus a reaction against the distrust created by the false facts that were spread during the war (Schudson 122, 144). According to Marzolf, one of the new aspects of New Journalism were the different aesthetics the paper had. “The ‘new journalism’ made use of big headlines, showy illustrations and lively writing to attract large circulations, fat columns of advertisements and huge profits” (529). This was all done to attract a group of new, inexperienced readers, bringing them news that could inform, but most of all entertain. Roggenkamp stresses this entertaining purpose of the paper. The ideal of new journalism was entertainment; in their paper, the narrative function of the stories was the most important. They created dramatic and some fictional stories, alternated with more factual stories as reports (xii). The story gained the leading role within

9 New Journalism. Where first facts were presented in a more reported form, now journalists would get into a story and write an interesting and pleasurable article for the readers. Serious information topics were alternated with sensational and entertaining topic, in order to keep the audience interested in reading. So, the nineteenth century can be seen as a time in which major changes in the press of the United States occurred. The press changed in reaction to shifts in society, developing standards that are still important in journalism. During this period questions about the press were stated: What can the press do? How and why should they do it? And what are the implications of that? Objectivity is the most important ideal that came out of this period of change. As John Pauly explains it: “Objectivity has been treated as the powerful, dominant norm that defines American journalists’ professional identity, and interpretation as the day-to-day challenge that calls that deep philosophical commitment to objectivity into existence” (592). The objective reporting in combination with the writing of an interesting story became the key interests of the journalists. Bringing the readers serious and entertaining content. Much of what we now take for granted as the standards of journalism evolved in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The next section will explore the development of these standards during the next important changes of journalism and will look at how radio and television influenced the ideals of journalism.

1.3 Radio and Television Take the Lead

An important development in the field of mass communication is the appearance of radio and television. The first radio stations appeared in the 1920s. From then on the radio developed itself into a formally institutionalised medium. Radio as a new medium designated a step forward on the technological level, reaching the audience in a new way. As radio was a live medium that could reach millions of people without having to transport the media products all over the country, it created a new relationship with the audience. The audience received the information immediately via their radio. Providing the audience with access to knowledge about what was happening in their country more directly than was possible with print media. The rise of live news was one of the aspects of the radio that made it such a revolutionary invention (Cushion 33). The arrival of the new medium, radio, triggered strife between radio and newspapers. The newspapers were afraid that radio would take away advertising and sales profit (Larson 277). This resulted in a ‘Press-Radio War’, as Gary W. Larson explains it. It was a war about deciding who had the control on how the news would be distributed (277). The radio war would last from 1933-1939.

10 In the beginning, radio stations had the purpose of promoting newspapers. Most of the radio stations were owned or sponsored by newspapers, aiming to stimulate the newspaper sales (Emery and Emery 398). In the years that followed a discussion emerged between the newspapers and the radio stations about who had the right to bring the news. Eventually, this would result in two dominant press institutions, the United Press International and the Associated Press that provided the news for both the newspapers and the broadcasters. The news produced by these institutions would be read out loud during the . Despite the rules that were set on who had the right to make and present the news on the radio stations, certain broadcasters tried to bypass these rules. The Columbia System (CBS) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), were two of the broadcasters who managed to get around the rules about news broadcasting. In the competition between the radio stations to attract the widest audience possible, they all wanted to present the most recent and spectacular news to the audience (Emery and Emery 401). As radio stations did not had to conform to certain regulations on the level of news content that must be based on the social and political agenda, they focused more on the entertaining level of their stories (Cushion 36). One of the most important methods to attract a wide audience to listen to the radio stations was the coverage of major news events (Emery and Emery 401). CBS and NBC created their own independent news divisions, where the coverage of those major news events and the coverage of was an important aspect. The news presented by these broadcasting stations was more concentrated on being entertaining for the audience. Stephen Cushion argues that this would set the foundations for the market-driven news environment that would later on transfer to television (36). The broadcasting radio stations, CBS and NBC and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) would develop itself as the leading broadcaster in radio and would, later on, move into the medium television, where they are still important in the reporting of daily news (Emery and Emery 404). During World War II, the radio started to report stories about international crises and subsequent events. The broadcasting station CBS started broadcasting stories from reporters out of Europe and developed itself as a leading station in the era of modern news broadcasting (Larson 279). The reporting and commentary on international events did not only result in a bigger audience, it also changed the relation of those listeners to radio. According to Larson, by 1939 more than a quarter of the population had more confidence in the radio as their source of news than newspapers. They felt that radio presented the news more objectively than the newspapers did. Besides the fact that the audience started to see the radio as a more objective dispenser of the news, it became also a personalised medium. “(…) news on the radio would be more than just a bare reporting of facts. It would be personality-driven and dependent on the prose story-

11 telling abilities of the commentators” (Larson 279). Radio became a medium that delivered the news in a commentary format. Personalities that reported and commented the news for the radio, started to become comforting voices for the audience. It lasted until the 1950s till radio journalism started to take shape, as we know it in the contemporary environment. From then on with the arrival of FM, the radio started to focus more on music. The news did not play the leading role anymore. The newscasters and commentators that personalised the news before were replaced by disc jockeys, who entertained the listeners. The news was now presented in shorter newscasts between blocks of music, altered with commercial breaks (Larson 283). With the arrival of television in the 1940s, there was an extra competitor added to the competition between newspapers and radio stations in the field of reporting news. Around 1939 big events as the speeches given by president Roosevelt (the first president that was seen on television), and sports events in baseball, football and boxing games were shown on television. However, the techniques were very primitive at that time, the segments that were shown of the events were short and the content was shot with a single camera. World War II put in 1941 a temporary freeze on this development of television and delayed the rise of the medium. This halt to the rise of television did not last long, from 1949 on the number of households that owned a television set grew. Around 1955, almost half of the American households had a television (Emery and Emery 405). So the rise of television took place in the years after the war, developing itself into becoming the dominant mass medium in the 1960s (Emery and Emery 492). The three leading broadcasting stations of the radio, CBS, NBC and ABC made a transfer from radio to television, but their role on the radio remained important. On the television, these stations developed itself in becoming the leading networks in presenting the news (Emery and Emery 410). In the beginning years of television, the news was still second to the news that was presented on the radio stations. To step out of this second place in covering the news, television tried to distinguish itself from the way news was presented. Various visualisation techniques were used to keep the attention of the audience and to make the news more understandable for them. Television journalism started as a blend between the qualities of radio speech and . The newscast of the early years of television included an anchor that acted as the voice-over and the model they used was comparable to those of the newsreel. “Aspects of this model included ‘the fragmented succession of unrelated ‘stories’, the titles composed in the manner of front page headlines, and the practice of beginning each issue with the major news event of the day, followed by successively less important subject matter” (Allan 44). On radio stations the commentators and reporters could only be heard, however, on television the

12 anchors could also been seen. This brought a new layer to the medium, as images say more than words, the audience could now see what happened (Cushion 39). The rise of television can be linked to the upcoming of in the United States. Lynn Spigel argues that the television set in that time could be related to the middle-class of America, in which consuming was one of the most important activities (32-33). “Television, in this sense, soon became part of the increasingly consumer-driven culture of American life” (Cushion 39). Allowing advertisers on the news was thus a logical step for the television broadcasters. As Cushion argues, the advertisers directed the television news in the United States. Advertisements were part of every newscast (Allan 43). The audience was not only seen as people who had to be informed about what was happening in the world, but they were also seen as consumers. According to Stuart Allan, to make the news more entertaining for the audience, but also more attractive to the advertisers, the news was most of the time based on pre-scheduled events (45). However, this influence from the advertiser on the news eventually would lead to discussions about the impartiality of the news. Television had to find a balance between their editorial purpose and the commercial side of the advertisers and tread carefully when deciding what was newsworthy or not. This discussion became important when television took over the leading role of radio in presenting the news. As a result of this discussion on impartiality, in 1949 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) created a report on editorializing. This report set a couple of rules to ensure that the news covered public issues and that it showed these issues from different perspectives (Cushion 40). The FCC, in the following years, would have a lot of influence on regulating the news. According to Cushion: “Sharpening up its regulatory tools, under the authority of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1960s, the FCC provided perhaps the most sustained period of intervention into television journalism” (41). It pushed the commercial broadcasters towards producing content that was policed to cover news that should be educational to the audience (Cushion 41). By 1976, television developed itself into the single most popular news medium. More and more Americans started to choose television instead of newspapers to get their daily news. According to Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini, people started to believe television more than newspapers. One of the reasons for this trust in television journalism was the fact that television produced a much more centralised and nationalised environment of news (61). Another reason for this trust in television was the fact that television made everything visible. What only could be described on the radio, television could bring the viewers a close-up of the events that were broadcasted (Allan 46). The facts recorded by the cameras could not be ignored by the audience, resulting in an audience that trusted television more than other media. Throughout the 1980s this system of a couple of leading broadcasters started to change. The arrival of new technological inventions, like the cable and later on satellite communication,

13 set the globalisation and commercialization of news in motion. The number of television channels increased and television moved into a multi-channel era. This had an influence on the leading roles the broadcasters, NBC, CBS and ABC fulfilled so far. They had to deal with the competition of many other broadcasters, who all wanted attention from the audience. The audience was pushed to watch more television than ever (Cushion 46). All these developments influenced the regulations that were set up by the FCC in the 1960s. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, the deregulation was pushed into acceleration, caused by the commercial broadcasters that were becoming successful globally and the increase in channels on the television. New commercial programming could be created easily, concentrating on more consumer-based content (Cushion 46). Resulting eventually in the termination of the Fairness Doctrine – that should keep the balance in journalism on covering important issues in society – leaving the rules of impartiality behind (Cushion 47).

In this chapter I showed that the penny papers started with the first steps in building the journalistic standards by making the newspapers available for the masses. Penny paper journalists started to concentrate more on the reporting of events and using interview- techniques to find out the facts. In the period of New Journalism these techniques were developed further. Journalists would take their reporter role seriously by immersing themselves in the stories. After the propaganda of World War I, people wanted fact-based news that they could trust, resulting in more objective reporting. The news became more centralised for the audience with the arrival of radio and television. In order to maintain objective reporting, both for the radio as television rules were made to watch the quality of the news, keeping the news fact-based and educational. The next chapter focuses on journalism from the 80s until contemporary journalism. It reviews the emergence of entertaining news, explains more about the continual flow of news and explores how the Internet is affecting journalism.

14 2

Exploring the Boundaries of Journalism

The journalistic standards that were made over the course of the 19th century in order to guard and protect the production of the news were threatened by developments on the social, economical and technological level that occurred in the second half of the 20th century. Within these years of change, many critics argued that the quality of news decayed. This decay can be connected to four important developments. These four developments contributed to the construction of an environment in which fake news could evolve. The first development is the speeding up of the news with the arrival of the 24-hour news cycle. The second development is the blur between news and entertainment. The arrival of the Internet can be appointed to as the third development that changed the journalistic field. Lastly the arrival of social media contributed in the creation of the environment that fake news fitted into. The speeding up of the news, the tabloidization of the content, the arrival of the Internet and the distribution via social media platforms all created a journalistic environment in which the production and consumption of news changed. In this changing media landscape, a phenomenon as fake news got the possibility to emerge and grow. Fake news is fake content that is presented as being ’real’ news, in order to provoke confusion. Allcott and Gentzkow give in their article the following definition of fake news: “We define ‘fake news’ as news stories that have no factual basis but are presented as facts, we mean stories that originated in social media or the ” (5). The fake news stories that this research explores are the news stories that are produced on ‘fake news’ websites or social media platforms, are totally based on non- facts and distributed via social media platforms to reach as many people as possible. This chapter will focus on the question how fake news could gain a big share in the field of journalism. To be able to explain this reaction and place it into a broader context, it is first important to sketch the previous changes in the journalistic landscape. The broader historical context is used to show how fake news could emerge and put itself into a dominant position.

15 2.1 Moving Away From Facts

In the 1980s/1990s and later on satellite communication would arrive (Cushion 45). These technologies caused on the one hand an increase in channels and on the other hand it made faster and easier international communication possible. The increase in a number of channels, led the television environment into a multi-channel era where news started to become more commercialised (Sparks 3). This had the result that journalists started to focus more on the quantity than on the quality of news, moving away from the values that were set for journalism in the years before. As Cushion recapitulates this phenomenon of change: ” are thus increasingly subject to renegotiation and reinterpretation and can be shaped externally by their relationship with rival news outlets and competing media” (Cushion 62). With the arrival of new ways of presenting the news as the 24-hour news cycle and the more entertaining form of news, the news started to become more opinion and emotion-based.

2.1.1 The 24-hour News Cycle

Economic, technological and audience-related pressures caused the continuous transformations of the news industry. The expectations on news profitability were increasing, the audience lost its interest in traditional news and new technologies widened the possibilities on the communicating level (Bucy, Ganz and Wang 143). To participate in the on-going competition in the delivering of news, news stations started to focus more on the amount of news they produced. The news stations started to introduce the news in a continuous flow, something that is often referred to as the 24-hour news cycle. This on-going flow of news towards the audience started in the 1980s with the reporting of breaking news stories. Concentrating on the live aspect of presenting the news became a substantial aspect of television journalism. Where the leading broadcasters NBC, CBS and ABC concentrated at producing evening and night news shows, new news stations emerged that challenged these forms of news programming. Cable News Network (CNN) was one of these new stations that launched a news channel and contributed to the competition. The format they created was built on rolling news or 24-hour broadcasting. Stephanie Marriott describes it as, “television constitutes itself – particularly in an era of 24-hour broadcasting – as an apparently endless flow, always available and never pausing” (51). Cushion argues that the 24-hour news channel environment had an intense and systematic impact on the values and conventions of television in the last decade (64). Journalists that worked in the 24-hour news environment were more focused on pace than on the condition of the news itself. However, this fast running environment to deliver the latest news is not new,

16 it only is accelerated by certain developments in the industry. Cushion points out the arrival of the Internet as one of the aspects that sped up the news.

The promotion of instant, rolling news has been accelerated since the birth of the Internet and the creation of multi-media . With the technology at their fingertips to break news almost immediately, online – as much as 24-hour television news – journalists share the journalistic need for speed (…) (64).

Brighton and Foy mention the speed of the journalistic work as a negative effect of the continuous flow of news. With the focus on the quantity and fast presentation, journalists lost their accuracy on presenting a more in-depth story. The focus shifted from an in-depth, and fact- checked story towards a story that got the most attention from the audience. The second point they refer to is the speculative and repetitive quality of the news (94). 24-hour news channels have enough time to explain the context around a story, but most of the time they only present the same headlines repeated after each other (Cushion 72). The contextual and analytical parts of the news are missing. As Cushion describes it: “And yet constrained by the values of immediacy they have adapted, 24-hour news channels appear unable to deliver more contextual or analytical journalism than conventional news bulletins” (72). The news is often filled with speculations about possible outcomes and the impact of the event. The short headlines that are based on facts are rotated with these long-lasting discussions on the few facts that are given (Brighton and Fay 94). So, with the urgency to bring the audience updated news with the focus on the speed and the quantity, the 24-hour news channels lost the opportunity to bring the viewers a more in depth and meaningful version of their news stories (Bernstein 24). Another aspect that has changed with the arrival of the 24-hour news cycle is the reporting style. Within this fast running environment of delivering the news, the journalists have become less independent. After an incident, reporters used to go to the place of occurrence to report what happened and to create an in-depth story. In the 24-hour news environment, this traditional reporting style has changed. The reporters have become . With ‘breaking news’ stories the journalists are not going to the site as reporters, but tell the shortened version of the story in front of a camera as a (Cushion 75,82, Allan 198). This information is not independent and mostly is not as detailed as journalistic standards would require. “Most breaking news is neither live nor on location, with a limited range of sources used to interpret a story and a greater reliance on anchors reporting what the wires are sending into the studio” (Cushion 75). With the focus on the speed in making a news story the will not go deep into the topic using their knowledge on specific topics, but “they make hasty judgements and deliver quick-fit judgements” (Cushion 83). The correspondents repeat the same story every hour. Besides the correspondents that support the news story also got a supporting role within the news. They form a panel that comments on the news by giving

17 their opinion. These pundits are asked to give their opinion in order to create an extra layer to the story that is told (Cushion 83). So with the fast pace of producing stories journalist spend less time at checking facts, and more on delivering an interesting story for the public. The reporters have become correspondents that repeat the same information every hour, instead of properly investigating. The audience gets a continuous flow of repeated information, in which contact with the audience is more important than presenting an objective and truthful story.

2.1.2 The Blur Between News and Entertainment

The news environment that heavily incentivizes the speed over the quality of news also influences the content of the stories. According to Cushion, breaking news stories tend to concentrate more on soft news, as crime, celebrities, and human interest (77). This trend in switching from the more serious topics as politics, economics, or social issues towards the more entertaining subject matters is occurred the entire journalistic field (Williams and Delli Caprini 82). A tabloidization of the news took place, where the interest of the audience was used as starting point. Within this tabloidization, the entertaining topics started to blend with the information topics. The tension between informing and entertaining is not new. As mentioned in the first chapter, since the arrival of the penny press, journalism started to focus on trivial subjects next to the political, economical and social news. New Journalism followed this development by leading journalism towards a more trivial format. Schudson argues that this entertaining form of journalism always paralleled with the more analytical form of journalism (Schudson 89). However, where in the 19th and most part of the 20th century they managed to keep both genres separated, at the end of the 20th century the genres started to blur. In this period of change, the entertaining format started to gain a leading role in the field of journalism. According to Colin Sparks, the standards created for journalism were undermined by sensationalism and triviality. He argues that shabby reporting and the interest in only the entertaining genre, and ratings caused this decay (1). Thus, the first reason for the decline of the journalistic standards was the change of content. The priorities in journalism changed, news media became part of the entertainment industry instead of fulfilling the role of providing the people with information of public concern.

18 Bob Franklin discusses the change in the content and values of journalism with the transition and argues that:

Entertainment has superseded the provision of information; human interest has supplanted the public interest; measured judgment has succumbed to sensationalism; the trivial has triumphed over the weighty; the intimate relationships of celebrities, from soap operas, the world of sport or the royal family, are judged more ‘newsworthy’ than the reporting of significant issues and events of international consequence. Traditional news values have been undermined by new values; ‘’ is rampant (4).

Sparks discusses this blurring of formats as the mix between ‘’ and ‘serious journalism’. Tabloidization is the move from serious journalism towards an environment where sensationalism gets supremacy (10). Tabloidization is most of the time referred to with the term ‘infotainment’. The content of the news is moving towards sports, scandal and popular entertainment. The high standards that were set in the eras before are undermined by sensationalism and triviality. Another factor that undermined the journalistic standards was the shift towards market- oriented journalism. With the growing commercialisation of the media environment news stations started to focus more on their ratings (Sparks 47), something that put the journalists under more pressure to produce interesting stories. Where first journalists would believe that the writing of a good well-informed story would reach a wide range of people, nowadays the focus has shifted towards writing news that fits the targeted audience. Journalists follow the preferences of the audience the advertisers want to attract (Sparks 4). The framing and the selection of the news got more personalised, something that resulted in the loss of the independent role of the journalists. Not only the advertisers expected different content from the journalists, also the expectations of the audience itself changed. As mentioned before, it was difficult to keep the younger audience interested in watching traditional news. Higher competition has resulted in audience fragmentation, where the choice first was homogeneous the audience now had more choice (Morris 58). As their expectations changed towards entertaining stories instead of informing stories, the journalist had no choice but to adopt these preferences (Carey 5). Besides the change in content, also the visuals were subjected to a transformation. (Thussu 7-8). Visual aesthetics played an important role in binding the new generation of the television audience, using high production cost making the story more dramatic and emotional. As this audience is prone to channel hopping and zapping, the broadcaster tries to stick to them by using “(…) fast-paced visuals and rhetorical headlines from an, often glamorous anchor person” (Thussu 8, Calabrese 278). The channel exemplifies this period of journalism, as it has become a popular cable television news channel (Thussu 61). As a 24-hour news

19 channel, FOX news played a heavy emphasis on the visuals of their news programs. With their focus on the presentation, they aimed to attract the largest audience as possible (Jones 180). They used colourful and outstanding graphics to attract the audience and help them in grasping the main points of the news. They produced a more dynamic audio by using sound effects at the beginning of the news and combined it with dramatic multimedia visuals (Figure 1 (Morris 60)). In their aim to attract the younger individuals of the audience to their news station the danger of losing sight on the content came across. By only presenting big screaming headlines, the audience could be distracted from what is really said in the news. The outstanding visuals and audio were made to create emotions by the audience. This focus on emotions brings the news towards a genre that is made to entertain the audience instead of informing them.

Figure 1. Screenshot of news broadcast Fox news

This specific style of presenting the news by Fox influenced many other news stations. When other news stations noticed that this new style of performing journalism caused an increase in popularity of the news station, they started to increase the amount of entertainment- based news and transferred their focus towards the presentation (Morris 61). With the commercialisation of the journalistic environment, the genres entertainment and information started to blur into the new genre infotainment. This genre increased in popularity, due to the growing interest of the producers and consumers in entertaining content. The reaction of the news stations was the production of more sensational and trivial news. The news changed from content based on facts towards opinion-based news. So, the journalistic standards of objective, impartial and independent reporting changed into reporting that was based on emotions, and advertisers.

20 2.2 The Digitization of the News

In the twilight of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first, there is emerging a new form of journalism whose distinguishing qualities include ubiquitous news, global information access, instantaneous reporting, interactivity, multimedia content, and extreme content customization. In many ways this represents a potentially better form of journalism because it can reengage an increasingly distrusting and aliened audience. At the same time, it presents many threats to the most cherished values and standards of journalism (Pavlik 2001: xi).

The arrival of the Internet is the third factor that changed journalism, as it caused transformations in the global culture and commerce (Pavlik 1999: 54). According to Boczkowski the arrival of the Internet has an extreme impact on the existing media and especially on journalism. “Discourse about the potential implications of online technologies and the World Wide Web for the mass media has also had a drastic connotation, raising the spectre of radical consequences for the production and the consumption of news” (1). Pavlik refers to this new period as the arrival of a “new media system”. This new media system takes into account all forms of communication and puts it in a digital format in which the rules set for the analogue media format no longer apply (2001: xii). Part of this new media system is . Digital journalism, or also known as online journalism is journalism where news is distributed via the Internet. “The fourth kind of journalism - next to radio, television and print - is online journalism, seen as gathering and distributing original news content on the Internet” (Bardoel and Deuze 2). This could contain content that is produced for the online versions of the newspaper and television stations or content that is specifically produced for the news stations that only exist online. By moving from the traditional media towards the online environment the media contributed to the increase of available information. According to Dahlgren this increase of information is one of the effects of digital journalism. Where television already developed an increase in information in the decade before, the digitalisation developed this even further. Dahlgren argues that the competition in the online environment mostly occurs between journalism and non-journalism. In this wide web of information the boundaries between real journalism and raw information became blurred (62). The online environment made it possible for the audience to transform their role as a reader into a role as producer. This change within the online world created a new layer to the distribution and consumption of the news. Williams and Caprini argue that this new media environment, where everyone could become a producer, influenced the news media and its traditional gatekeepers (Williams and Caprini 77). Traditional journalism had to adjust itself to this changing role of the audience by expanding the news experience with the incorporation of interactivity; letting the audience comment on the news articles, and talk back to the journalists. This is all done to let the audience

21 engage in the dialogue of journalism (Braun and Gillespie 383). This engagement of the audience with journalism is also referred to as . Citizen journalism is the term that is used for the range of web-based activities of non-professionals (Goode 1288). Professionals thus not only produce content anymore, also non-professionals contribute in the process. The most important characteristic of this citizen journalism is interactivity. As mentioned, the role of the producer and consumer changed; the communication between both parties intensified (Dahlgren 60, Leckenby 13). In the digital environment, the role of the audience changed into an interactive one.

The key to understanding this is to see interactivity as a purely audience-related feature. It has not so much to do with the speed of news and journalistic activity - although it does facilitate fast work - but with the fact that online news has the potential to make the reader/user part of the news experience (Bardoel and Deuze 4).

Online the audience has the possibility to react on the news stories produced by the journalists. This can be done via for example email, the comment box underneath the story, forums, and social media. Besides a change in the role of the consumer, interactivity also changed the journalistic profession. Via the likes, comments, emails, tags and shares journalists get feedback from the audience. This feedback can be used to improve their journalistic skills and get an idea of the preferences of the audience (Burns, Highfield, and Ann-Lind 3, 8). However, this feedback did not only have a positive effect. The change from consumer to producer changed the consumers into possible non-professional journalists. When having the possibility of producing journalistic content on the Internet in the forms of , photo and video sharing, and posting eye-witness comments about current events, the audience produces journalistic content (Goode 1288). “Journalists may worry that amateur-quality contributions from users will undercut the professional sheen of their own work; news organisations may find they must work harder to protect their as they incorporate user-generated content” (Braun and Gillespie 384). The danger of this kind of journalism is that the non-professionals are not bound to the rules of journalism, resulting in journalistic content that is not written following the journalistic standards. In this online environment, news production started to concentrate more on the individual instead of the masses. Bardoel and Deuze refer to this as the customisation of content (5). The news content is adapted and customised to individual wants and needs of the audience. In other words, a personalization of the news took place (Boczkowski 2). With the arrival of social media, this personalisation increased even more. According to Cushion the rise of social media changed the way journalism is consumed and produced (2). The danger of this

22 personalization of the news is the shortening of the information that reaches the audience, making the news less diverse. Also, the focus on the opinion-based news instead of objective reporting could lead the audience towards a bubble in which they hear the same opinion over and over again. The problematizing of the filter bubbles in relation to fake news will be explained more deeply in chapter three. Online journalism also changed the way news is distributed. News articles are spread out on the Internet via the use of hyperlinks. Bardoel and Deuze call this new form of linking specific news articles to each other hypertextuality (5). In every news story, certain links to other web pages, archives or news articles are placed to give the story a more active dimension. This gives the reader the opportunity to read more about one topic. The journalists are in this way forced to guide the reader to their information and explain the different layers of a story. Hyperlinks are not only used to provide the reader with more information, most of the time they are placed on websites to promote specific news articles. Journalists want to make the reader click on their story, so the readers will be linked to the website of the news station. The more clicks, the more people visit the website, which results in increased earnings. The use of click-baits in the online environment will be explained more thoroughly in chapter three. The rise of online journalism changed many things in the consumption and production of news. Journalists were not the only producers of news content anymore with the change of consumers into producers. However, the quality of the content produced by non-professionals could be questioned, as they possibly did follow the journalistic standards. Another aspect of online journalism was the change in the production of the news. With the personalization of content the news became more based on emotions and opinion. On the level of distribution, hyperlinks were used in order to spread all the content on the Internet.

2.2.1 Social Media and News

Social media platforms can be labeled as the most popular Internet services in the world (Gil de Zúñiga, Jung, and Valenzuela n.pag.). These platforms give the users the possibility to share information, receive information and produce information. These sites help people to connect with each other and share the same interests, political views and activities (Boyd and Ellison 210). As being the most popular services on the Internet, social media platforms play an important role in the changing flow of news and information. They offer a new way of discovering and finding the news and can be seen as competitors for the traditional news media (Newman 2011: 10). More and more people are starting to use social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook as their news source (Gottfried and Shearer 2). Facebook is the most popular source of news, according to Amy Mitchell, Jeffrey Gottfried and Katerina Eva Matsa

23 (17). Around 60% of the younger Internet users (born from the 1980s until ), use Facebook as their news source to get information. Some studies argue that the new generation is not interested in news about topics as politics anymore (Marchi 247-248), where other studies argue that it is not a lack of interest, but a change in sources (Leckenby 24). Singer, Clark and Monserrate found in a study of undergraduate university students that, “Young people today are not necessarily uninformed, but rather they are differently informed than previous generations, getting news via cell phone texts, email, social networking sites, and conversations with friends and family” (Marchi 248). Taking these numbers into account, it can be argued that social media can be seen as a contributor in the news distribution. The most important aspect of social media platforms is their use of interactivity. The aim of the social media platforms is to make the user into an active user, by encouraging them to post, share and react. The higher the interactivity of the users the more information is produced and can be distributed via the social media platforms (Berg n.pag.). These platforms can be seen as websites that create a public sphere, as they connect people to each other and let them communicate back and forward, via commenting, posting, sharing and liking (Boyd and Ellison 213). These online public spheres are becoming places where the users can share and discuss the news and thus contribute to the news (Hermida et al. 817). To attract the largest amount of readers the distribution of information across the web is extremely important and valuable to journalists, content providers and advertisers (Bandari, Asur, and Huberman 26). Journalists are promoting their own articles via the social media platforms in order to extend their audience and reach more brand loyalty (Lasorsa et al. 20). One way of distributing the news articles is by putting a direct link (hyperlink) to the article on the social media platforms. These links serve as a tool to stimulate the interactivity of the users. The journalist tries to let the users click on the story in order to generate more activity on the news website. Chapter three will explain the distribution of news via social media platforms in more detail. Thus, the social media platforms are not the producers of the content, but serve as a host. Despite the fact that these platforms only serve as a host of the news content, they still have to guard the information that is put online. As a distributor of news, they have the same obligations as the traditional journalistic professionals and have to keep an editorial oversight of what content is produced or shared (Deuze, Bruns and Neuberger 323). However, this guarding on information that is produced is not always accomplished in a serious manner. As the social media platforms are designed to serve as a platform where the users can upload and share content, the platforms do not select the content based on their quality. The selecting of content is done via an algorithmic system that takes into account the preferences of the users, providing them with information that the algorithm thinks they will like the most (a more detailed

24 explanation of algorithms will be given in the third chapter). It is not the journalists who decide what the audience needs anymore. Now the audience themselves in combination with the algorithms will decide what information and news they will receive. So it can be argued that the distribution of news on social media reshapes the relationship between the traditional news media and the audience (Hermida et al. 817). ‘‘Understanding not only what content users will want to consume, but also what content they are likely to pass along, may be a key to how stories are put together and even what stories get covered in the first place’’ (Olmstead, Mitchell and Rosenstiel 1). In order to keep their stories attractive for the audience, journalist continue to produce stories that fitted the preferences of the audience, resulting in more opinion-based and soft news stories. Social media platforms developed itself as important contributors in the journalistic field. They are influencing the way news is consumed and produced, by letting the users play an active role. The users as individual persons gets more power when they can contribute to the news and when the news is adapted to their longings. As more people have started to use social media platforms to get their news, the traditional news media are changing to fit into this new environment. However, when the journalists are adapting their content to the preferences of the individuals, the objective and fact-based reporting is becoming less important. Besides, with the distribution of news and information, the social media platforms are not selecting the content on the level of being good quality-based journalism. They do not have gatekeepers that guard the quality of the content, the production of facts, objective reporting. The journalistic standards decrease in importance in this social media environment, taking journalism towards a place where the relationship between fact and fiction is off balance.

2.3 The Outcome: The Decline of ‘Traditional Journalism’

All of the four previous mentioned changes in the journalistic field contributed to the creation of a journalistic environment in which the standards of journalism were put under pressure. First of all, speeding up the news frequency played an important role. With the focus on the fast pace, the time that was spent on checking the facts decreased. The journalists wanted to quickly deliver an interesting story and thereby lost their focus on the quality of the content. Second, the blur between information and entertainment changed the role of the journalist towards a less independent one. As they were adapting their stories to the preferences of the readers, they lost the freedom of producing stories they thought were important. From now on journalism would be based on the emotions of the audience and on the want and needs of advertisers instead of reporting what was valuable for society. The third striking factor in the neglecting of the

25 journalistic standards was the arrival of the Internet. The Internet created an environment in which the exclusive role for the journalists to produce news was disrupted. The role of the audience changed from a passive into an active role. The interactive feature of the web gave the audience the possibility to respond to the news articles, which made the journalists dependent on the audience. Journalists had to adapt the feedback of the audience, ending with and sensational content. These changes in journalism were even further strengthened with the arrival of social media platforms. With their focus on the interactive role of the users, the contribution of the audience to the news enlarged. As many people started to use the social media platforms as their news sources, news stations expanded the distribution of news via those platforms. With this use of hyperlinks for distribution, the focus shifted towards a writing ambience in which outstanding headlines and images were used to reach the reader. Also, the audience was influenced, as their news was filtered according to their own preferences. They could end up in an echo chamber of the same information that is repeated over and over again. Social media platforms do not have news filters that select on quality, they only have filters that select on what the people like. This brought journalism into an environment where the journalists produce what the audience wants, leaving the audience with news that is less objective and of lower quality. Within this speeded up, sensationalised, interactive and online news environment a phenomenon as fake news could gain an important role in contemporary society. The digitised information environment in which everyone can act as a journalist and produce their own content, news stories emerge that are misleading and untrue. The role of gatekeepers that function as a watchdog to check the information that is produced on its objectivity, factuality and truthfulness is decreasing, making it easy for people to produce ‘news’ content that not based on facts. News stories produced by non-journalists that are based on lies and false information can be labelled with the term ‘fake news’. As mentioned in the introduction of this chapter the definition of fake news that Allcott and Gentzkow give, will be used as the starting point to explain what fake news is and how it could gain such a substantial role in the contemporary society. “We define “fake news” as news stories that have no factual basis but are presented as facts, we mean stories that originated in social media or the news media” (5). With this definition, they exclude satire news stories – as those stories are not presented as facts – and statements made by political figures and candidates. This research will mainly focus on fake news stories that are produced on ‘fake news’ websites and distributed via social media platforms, however, the statement made by important political figures on social media platforms as Twitter will be shortly mentioned as part of the problem.

26 2.3.1 Fake News Made its Entrance

The misleading effect of the fake news stories had become a big problem all over the world. The news that is made up is adapted to what the people like to hear. They link the fake news stories to big events like the US elections of 2016, trying to reach as many people as possible. As Denise- Denise-Marie Odway outlines on the website Journalist’s Resource: “Much of the fake news that flooded the Internet during the 2016 election season consisted of written pieces and recorded segments promoting false information or perpetuating conspiracy theories” (n.pag.). Many fake news stories were spread out about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Examples of headlines of fake news stories are: “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement” published on the website Ending the Fed, “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide” published on the website Denver Guardian, and “Trump Offering Free One-Way Tickets to Africa & Mexico for Those Who Wanna Leave America” published on the website tmzhiphop.com (BuzzFeed news n.pag.). These examples are just a view of hundreds of fake news stories that were spread out during the election period. All these stories together had a huge impact on how the audience was informed about the politics, as many people read and believed those stories to be true (Allcott and Gentzkow 3). In this last part of the chapter the conditions that made the production of fake news possible, will be explained in relation to the changes in the journalistic field that were explained in the first part of this chapter. There are several reasons for people to produce fake news stories and spread them on the Internet. The two most important reasons can be divided into an economic motivation and a political motivation. The economic motivation can be related to the online revenue model. In the online environment, click-baits play an important role in the earnings model of many websites (Chen, Conroy and Rubin News in an Online World: n.pag.). They are aiming for clicks to their websites to get more ad-based earnings. One of the purposes of those fake news stories is not to entertain the readers, but to mislead them and to make money out of it. Fake news is not emphasising that the news they produce is fake. They pursue to make the fake news stories mimic the ‘real’ news stories, trying to let the readers believe that the stories are true. They are imitating the aesthetics of the ‘real’ news in order to reach as close as possible the realness of the original news. The topics of the fake news stories are often adapted to the emotions of the readers. Using both political issues and more sensational topics in order to cause an emotional reaction of each individual, with the assumption that people who click faster when the topic fits into their own preferences. The second important reason for the production of fake news stories can be related to the politics of specific countries and especially to the politics in the United States. Allcott and

27 Gentzkow state their concern about the effect of fake news on politics. Especially around the 2016 election in the United States, there was a great concern on the influence of fake news stories. As many people started to use social media as their news source instead of the traditional news media, this concern was and is not unrealistic (212). Silverman argued that fake news stories are shared via social media more often than traditional news stories, this combined with the fact that many people believe those stories leads to speculations about the degree of influence the fake news stories have on the political environment. Many fake news stories were written about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and most stories favoured Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. This has led to the suggestion that Donald Trump would not have been selected if fake news had not played an important role during the elections (2016: n.pag.). There is no proof for speculations like this, but it shows that fake news certainly has an influence on the politics of the United States. Some of the fake news stories are produced to influence the political structures in a specific country. Especially around elections, fake stories are spread out on the Internet in order to influence the voting behaviour of the people. One big organisation that affected the US Elections was Russian Today (RT). RT is a Russian broadcasting network that is the first 24-hour English-language news channel in the country. According to several researchers, this broadcasting network was accused in a recently declassified United States intelligence report for intervening in the 2016 US Election (Goldman, Russell NY Times: n.pag., Timberg The Washington Post: n.pag.). “The Russians are accused of hacking the email systems of the Democratic National Committee and conducting a widespread campaign that included the propagation of fake news stories on the Internet and the airwaves” (Goldman, Russell NY Times: n.pag). The RT was trying to influence the result of the 2016 US Elections by spreading fake news stories via social media, the use of Internet trolls (people who post reactions on forums, websites and chat channels with the goal of exposing emotions), and the spread of propaganda (Goldman, Russell NY Times: n.pag). America was and is not the only country that got targeted by the Russian broadcasters. The RT targeted as well the U.K.’s Brexit vote, March’s Dutch elections, the elections in France, and it is likely to predict that they also will accuse the upcoming elections in the U.K. and Germany (Goldman, Russell NY Times: n.pag). Thus, fake news stories are both produced out of an economic and political perspective. A large number of fake news stories are produced to generate click-baits via the social media platforms. Misleading the readers with stories that look like ‘real’ news stories in order to make them click on the hyperlink. Many stories are only produced with economic incentives. However, some of them are used to comment on and influence the dominant political messages, using the online interactive environment to reach a large audience. Especially

28 focussing on the social media platforms that stimulate the users to engage actively with the content through liking, sharing and commenting.

This chapter has explained the changes in the journalistic landscape that started in the 1980s until contemporary journalism. In this period journalism went through a process of rethinking and reinventing itself. This process has still not come to an end. Journalistic standards, values and ethics were viewed in a different perspective and were subject to critical questions. The increase in available information led to a commercialisation of the field, which, caused the rise of the entertainment and introduced journalism in the digital media culture. The news became a participatory based medium; “a time where (some of) the news is gathered, selected, edited and communicated by professionals and amateurs, and by producers and consumers alike” (Deuze, Bruns and Neuberger 322). All these developments were adopted by traditional journalism to keep the audience interested in the medium. Unfortunately, this did not work out as hoped. Especially the younger audiences were not interested anymore in traditional news media. They gathered their news via news sources on social media platforms and search engines. One result of the changing media landscape is the arrival of fake news stories, something that brought a lot of disquiet into society about their ability to trust journalism. The boundaries between what are facts and what are started to blur, leaving the audience behind in with an unclear information-soup. The next chapter will continue with exploring the phenomenon of fake news further by exploring how fake news is distributed on the Internet. Trying to find out to what extend the social media platforms Facebook and Twitter play a role in the spread of the fake news stories and how they differ in the distribution of content.

29 3

The Distribution of Fake News

Social media platforms such as Facebook have a dramatically different structure than previous media technologies. Content can be relayed among users with no significant third party filtering, fact-checking, or editorial judgment. An individual user with no track record or reputation can in some cases reach as many readers as Fox News, CNN, or the New York Times (Allcott and Gentzkow 2).

With the arrival of social media platforms, a new form of news distribution arrived. News articles are shared on the news feeds of the platforms aiming on as many readers as possible (Newman 2011: 10, Agichtein et al. 183). Usually fake news articles are distributed via these social media platforms. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have a dominant position in this distribution. Facebook can be seen as the leader in the field of distributing news (Newman 2011: 6). Twitter also plays an important role, as the interface makes it possible for the users to post short messages (Tweets) that can be read by any other Twitter user (Huberman, Romero and Wu 3). Distribution of information on these platforms is done via a complicated algorithmic calculation that makes the interaction between users possible. It is within this world of algorithms that the social interaction between people is changing. The personalised social feeds are influencing the relationship between the self and others, steering people into a world that is becoming more and more individual (Berg n.pag.). This chapter will explore how fake news is distributed, focussing on Facebook and Twitter as the social media platforms that are the most important in spreading of fake news stories. First starting with an explanation on how the news feeds of the social media platforms work, followed by a more in-depth analysis of the effects of the social media platforms and fake news on society.

3.1 Newsfeed

The main pages of social media platforms are an important interface when it comes to spreading information. Via this interface, they are offering users the opportunity to spread information and share it with friends and family. Facebook and Twitter are two examples of social media platforms that make use of such an interface. This interface, where the users can see the stream of posts/tweets of the accounts the person has chosen to follow, is called the news feed. When

30 individuals subscribe to these social media platforms they get their own personal newsfeed, with personalised information (Rader and Gray n.pag.).

The personal and interactional data that is generated through Facebook user activity becomes part of the social graph (a term commonly used by Facebook to describe the system’s architecture) and is visualized through the Timeline and automatically distributed to other users through the News Feed (and it’s real-time sibling Ticker) (Berg n.pag.).

The newsfeed shows the users messages of their friends, articles, news and advertisements. Instant interaction with these posts is the main purpose of the social media platforms. Sharing, commenting, posting, tweeting, retweeting and liking are important aspects of social media (Kwak et al. 1.). All these actions have consequences for the personal newsfeed, but also for the newsfeed of the social graph. Martin Berg describes this complicated structure of Facebook: “Facebook is thus not simply mapping relationships to certain objects, but rather establishes an understanding of rich connections between a larger number of actions and objects and that in turn determines how information is shown to users.” (n.pag.). When becoming friends on Facebook, it is a two-way relationship, where both of the users receive information about each other. On Twitter, this relation between friends works in a different way. Twitter users follow others or are followed. “Unlike on most online social networking sites, such as Facebook or MySpace, the relationship of following and being followed requires no reciprocation” (Kwak et al. 591). This means that a user can follow another user without the need of the other user to follow him or her back (Humberman, Romero and Wu 3). All these connections between the users are translated into the news feed through the use of algorithms. In combination with the user activity, these algorithms determine what each individual is seeing on their timeline. Within this algorithmic environment social buttons play an important role. These buttons give the users the opportunity to share, recommend, like or bookmark content, posts and pages (Gerlitz and Helmond 1351). On Facebook these buttons have the form of a share and a like button. The use of the like button materialises data points for the algorithms in order to sort, predict and manage what the users sees (Andrejevic 287, Gerlitz and Helmond 1358). Twitter makes use of a retweet button and a like button. Retweeting is the characteristic of the Twitter interface, as the most information is diffused on twitter via this social activity. “The retweet mechanism empowers users to spread information of their choice beyond the reach of the original tweet’s followers” (Kwak et al. 591). Once a tweet is retweeted, it is likely that the tweet is retweeted repeatedly. This brings the information into a fast diffusion, reaching a large number of people. The algorithm of Twitter used to be different from the algorithm of Facebook. It showed all the tweets in chronological order. However, recently Twitter changed their algorithms into one that comes closer to the algorithms used by Facebook.

31 A more personalised algorithmic system is used to let the users of Twitter see a large variety of tweets (Oremus n.pag.). The downside of using algorithms is the fact that they block a lot of information, making information invisible for the users. Rader and Gray discuss this “threat of invisibility”.

(…) personalization algorithms select a subset of items from the corpus, rank or organize them according to a proprietary algorithm, and present them to users for consumption in their News Feeds. If a user were to contribute a post that the News Feed algorithm does not display near the top of others’ News Feeds, that post becomes effectively invisible to those users (n.pag.).

So it is not the people anymore who decide what is important, but algorithmic calculations authorise the information that is flowing towards the people. Making not all the information available for the users is not without consequences, as there is the possibility of reducing the available information for the users. A lot of researchers are concerned about the selection of information. As many people use social media now as their news source, this algorithmic selection influences the news that the people are reading. Where first the producers of news had the power on what the people could read, now the news is filtered for each individual. There is no ranking anymore in high- and low-quality news, leaving the user with content that is filtered on the level of their personal preferences, but not on the quality of the content (Agichtein et al. 183). There is the danger of coming into a filter bubble of information, containing filtered information with a commercial perspective instead of a quality-based perspective. A filter bubble that filters the information the users receive via social media, but not everything is filtered. The dangers of this filter bubble will be explained further on in this chapter. The newsfeed of the social media platforms determine what information the users receive. Algorithms are used to filter the information according to the preferences of the users. Where first professional filters were used in the news consumption, now social filters take the lead. The algorithms of the social media platforms that provide the users with personalised news make no difference between what is real and what is fake news. It is within this unstructured system of distributing news that fake news could gain such an important position.

3.2 Click-Bait

As mentioned before, the social media platforms generate an interface that continuously pushes information towards the users (Mitchell and Rosenstiel 2). This information is a combination of content that is shared and content that contains sponsored messages. It is within this overload

32 of information that the user can lose control of the trustworthiness and credibility of the content. When information is distributed via the social media platforms the news articles are decontextualized from their source, caused by the screaming headlines and outstanding images that give often the wrong impression of an article. In this de-contextualization of the news article, the mix between fact and fiction could easily occur. Journalists and other producers of content on the Internet do everything to get the attention of the viewers, resulting in bad reporting that is unverified and sometimes not even based on a single fact (Chen, Conroy and Rubin News in an Online World: n.pag). News that is produced both by professionals and non-professionals these days concentrates more on the speed and spectacle instead of on the verification of facts and objective reporting. One of the most important goals of the news articles is to generate the highest amount of clicks on the news articles to create more page views. This click-based system is most of the time related to the advertisement model to earn money. “The online media economy is largely based around monetization of “views” through advertising revenue” (Chen, Conroy and Rubin News in an Online World: n.pag.). The number of clicks is important for both the social media platforms as the advertisers. The user-generated content that is generated on the social media platforms delivers the platforms personal information about the users that is highly valuable for the advertisers (Krombholz, Merkl, and Weippl 180). On Facebook, all the likes of the users tell something about the preferences of the users, something that the advertisers can use to make personal advertisements. Also the likes form a connection between users and web objects, as the clicks on specific hyperlinks leads the users to other places on the web (Gerlitz and Helmond 1358). “Each click on a Like button is supposed to lead to more traffic for, and more engagement with, web content, as friends of likers are likely to follow their contacts’ recommendations or might be influenced by what their friends like” (Gerlitz and Helmond 1358). Also the business model of Twitter is largely based on advertisement revenue and sponsored tweets (Goldman, David n.pag.). This environment of catching attention of the users by trying to let them actively participate on the social media platform influences the news environment. As many news articles are distributed via social media platforms, the journalists contribute in this race for attention. The way journalists write their stories changed within this new environment. When writing a story they now concentrate on writing a good and catchy headline that attracts the attention of the reader and makes them click, instead of writing a qualitatively good story (Blom and Hansen 87). Click-bait is not only influencing the producers of news; also the readers of the news articles are influenced by this technique. The use of hyperlinks to spread the news via social media platforms affects the reading techniques of the readers. Attracted by the headlines and

33 images of the news articles, the readers are tempted to click on the hyperlink that leads to the web page of the news station. However, the number of people that actually read the article that they clicked on Facebook or Twitter is not that high. As Tony Haile writes in an article for TIME:” most people who click don’t read. In fact, a stunning 55% spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page” (n.pag.). People get their information via the headlines of the news articles, instead of the content of the news article itself. This environment of the social media platforms where information is easily spread to a lot of people is an ideal place for the spread of fake news stories. Fake news producers try to generate activity on their webpage, something they can easily accomplish by sharing their article on social media. The more people click on their hyperlink, the more traffic is generated to their web pages. In order to attract a large group of people to click on the hyperlinks, they try to copy the technique of writing striking headlines and using interesting images.

3.3 Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers

Everything on the Internet gets personalised, search engines, advertisements and also news articles are subjected to a selection. The vice president of Yahoo said that: “the future of the web is about personalization (…)” (Pariser n.pag.). This personal based environment is in favour of the advertisers. The more they know about the personal interest of the consumers, the more they can base the advertisements on these personal preferences to increase the chance that the consumer will buy their products. This personalisation is not only shaping the consuming behaviour on the level of products, it also influences the consumption of news. The news is not only consumed anymore via the ‘traditional’ news stations but as mentioned in chapter two, other platforms collaborated in the environment of news distribution. Pariser argues that Facebook is becoming the primary source for news. The news is filtered according to the preferences of the user. “The new generation of Internet filters looks at the things you seem to like – the actual things you’ve done, or the things people like you like – and tries to extrapolate” (Pariser n.pag.). This filtering could bring each individual in their own bubble of information, which influences their way to encounter ideas and information. This influencing of the opinions and views of individuals is done by continuously echoing the same sort of content over and over again. When information is adapted to personal preferences, the user will not see information from different angles anymore, something that could result in the of people. “In the early 2000s, the growth of online news prompted a new set of concerns, among them that excess diversity of viewpoints would make it easier for like-minded citizens to form “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles” where they would be insulated from contrary perspectives”

34 (Allcott and Gentzkow 2). This concern about news that is distributed via social media platforms is something that is also applicable to fake news. When in a filter bubble the audience has no overview on what kind of information they are receiving, so they cannot filter by themselves whether or not the information they read is true (Pariser n.pag.). Filtering of information influenced the quantity and variety of political information that is spread in the online environment. Political information of a specific political party is often shared on social media platforms between people with the same ideological preferences (Barberá et al. 1540). Hearing the same opinion over and over again is coming with the danger of sending individuals towards political extremism. Resulting in a group of people that holds an assortment of believes that differ from society’s norm. These believes are often extremely left of extremely right orientated. “(…) greater access to information may foster selective exposure to ideologically congenial content, resulting in an “echo chamber” environment that could facilitate social extremism and political polarisation” (Barberá et al. 1531). In the online environment, people have access to more information than ever, however in the process of selecting news people have the tendency to select news that is all written from the same ideological point of view.

Given this dramatic increase in the number of available news outlets, it is not surprising that media choices increasingly reflect partisan considerations. People who feel strongly about the correctness of their cause or policy preferences seek out information they believe is consistent rather than inconsistent with their preferences (Iyengar and Hahn 20).

So both the user and the algorithmic interfaces of the social media platforms contribute to the building of an ‘echo chamber’. Partisanship is growing within this world of online information that is preselected according to people’s own preferences. This growth of partisanship is also visible in the contemporary environment where fake news had the possibility to increase. Many researchers, journalists, and politicians see this new environment, where opinion and belief took over from objectivity and fact, as a new era where the truth had become less important. This era is called the Post-Truth era, an era that is focused more on opinion and personal belief than on the distribution of objective facts (Speed and Mannion 250). It is within this era of opinion and belief that the political strategies of populism could grow in popularity. Ewen Speed and Russell Mannion describe populism as: “’populist politicians’ reliance on assertions that appear true, but have no basis in fact, creates a false view of the world, not with the intention of convincing the elites that they are right, but in reinforcing prejudices among their targeted pool of potential supporters” (250). Populism is often related to the election of President Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign as both are interpreted as being a populist reaction against the traditional institutions of liberal democracy. Social media

35 platforms were used as a mouthpiece for those events, spreading fake news and alternative stories in order to influence the opinion of the voters, spread fear and bad stories about the counterparty. Trump has done this by using the social media platform Twitter to spread false information about his opponent Hillary Clinton (See figure 2). In the aim to enlarge their supporters, social media platforms were perfect for the spread of rumours, gossip and false messages (Speed and Mannion 249, 251).

Figure 2. Tweet Donald Trump to attack Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US Elections – 15 of Donald Trump’s Most Popular Tweets Twitter: n.pag.

Not only the political leaders used social media platforms to influence the opinion of the voters, also others produced fake news to promote populism. Fake news producers used this growing popularity of populism as a chance to get attention for the fake political stories. The social media platforms Facebook and Twitter are contributing in making personal-based filter bubbles for the users of the platforms. The news the users receive within those bubbles only represents the opinion the users already have. This repeating of the same opinion could lead to extremism in the political field and contributed to the rise of populism in the contemporary environment. Many fake news producers play on to this transformation in politics with their fake news stories, making use of the services of the social media platforms to distribute their stories. Social media platforms are filtering on personal preferences, and not on the quality and truthfulness of stories, so fake news stories could continue to spread it via the platforms and continue to influence the political environment.

This chapter showed how fake news producers use social media platforms to spread the fake news stories. As the social media platforms continue to distribute all sorts of content via their interfaces without checking them on reliability and quality, fake news producers continue to use these platforms to spread their fake stories. When both the social media platforms and the readers are not able to filter out the misleading and fake stories, the damage these stories wreak

36 will grow. The distribution of fake news has a large influence on social, political and economical levels in society. On the social level, it influences the person’s understanding of important issues. On the political level, fake news stories are playing on and contributing in the move towards populism. And on the economic level, they make use of the click-bait techniques to attract the audience with their outstanding headlines and images. Thus, social media platforms play a crucial role in the distribution of fake news stories on the Internet, giving it the opportunity to lure the readers into clicking on their stories in order to make money and influence the standing political conventions.

37 4

The Aesthetics of Fake News

Fake news can be seen as a ‘new’ form of journalistic content that responds to the shift towards emotion-based news. Within the emotion-based news environment, journalists have the chance to produce stories containing their opinion. Where the main focus first was on objective and fact-based reporting, now the focus lies on playing on the emotions of the readers. Touching the emotions of the readers can be done via the content of the stories, including more entertaining and sensational topics in the news. Another technique to play on the emotions of the audience is through the use of specific aesthetics, influencing the sensory experience of reading the news (Buck-Morss 6). Branding plays an important role in this shift towards emotions. The audience has to create loyalty for a specific brand; this is done by building a relationship through emotions (Warner 20). Just like branding, fake news stories try to attract and bind the audience to their websites by responding to emotions of the people. They play with the emotions of the audience through the aesthetics of the stories. In the search for an audience, the fake news websites often mimic the aesthetics of the traditional news websites. This chapter analyses if and how the fake news websites mimic the aesthetics of the traditional news websites. An analysis is performed of the fake news website abcnews.com.co and the website of ABC news. The analysis is divided into two different sections: graphic design, and rhetoric and style. With this analysis, I will try to find out what the reasons of this fake news websites are to make the aesthetics of their stories similar to those employed by the traditional news stories and how both of them try to play on the emotions of the readers.

4.1 ABC News

As mentioned in the first chapter, ABC News was and is an important distributor of news in the United States. According to the website, they bring: “breaking news, analysis, exclusive interviews, headlines and videos” (abcnews.go.com). They present themselves as “your trusted source”, emphasising the journalistic standards of trust and objectivity. This focus on trust is not their only tool to attract the audience to their website. As Brady and Phillips argue: “As websites continue to fight for the attention of potential users, designers must begin to look not only at the inherent usability of the site but also its perceived usability.” (n.pag.). The design of a website is

38 important to create a pleasing experience for the eye of the viewer, something that helps to attach the viewers. Analysing the website of ABC news, the design is something that has a substantial role. In their aim to reach a broad audience the journalists try to reach the audience by playing on their emotions. This is also done by the use of outstanding headlines and images. abcnews.com.co is a fake news website that mimics the aesthetics of the ABC news website on the level of name, logo, and use of headlines and images. Many fake news stories produced on this website have gone viral on the Internet. Stories as "Obama Signs Executive Order Banning The Pledge Of Allegiance In Schools Nationwide", and "Drug Kingpin Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman Escapes Mexican Prison For The Third Time” (abcnews.com.co), reached a large range of people. The fact that the articles produced on this website look like ‘real’ news articles and are made under the same name is misleading the audience and lures them into reading the tempting stories. The analysis will start with a comparison of the design of the homepages of the two websites. After the comparison between the two websites on the level of the aesthetics, the content of the news stories will be subjected to an analysis, concentrating on the headlines and the images that are used in the news articles.

4.1.1 Graphic Design

When comparing the two websites, the first thing that stands out is the name of both websites. The URL abcnews.com.co is almost the same as the URL of the original website abcnews.go.com. Further on the design of the two websites is extremely comparable. Both websites make use of white spaces, banners with headlines, colours, and visually organised information (See figure 3 and 4). Cooke argues that this use of information graphics and use of images enlarged the functionality of the screen and the quality of scanning of the home page (39). When looking at figures 3 and 4 it is clear that the layouts of both websites are comparable. Both websites have their logo on the left side on the top of the web page and a banner under or next to this logo where the viewers can click on topics that lead them to more content on the web page. Through the mimicking of the layout of the website it is clear that the fake news website tries to use the same brand in order to lure the audience. The website tries to create an emotional connection between their brand and the audience. Jamie Warner argues that one way to build a relationship with the consumer is through branding. It’s important to build a relationship with the consumers; this is not done through the dissemination of information, but through the play of emotion. In this play of creating emotions by the consumers, the aesthetics play an important role (20). With outstanding visuals, sound, the consumer is lured to check out the specific brand.

39

Figure 3. Screenshot homepage abcnews.com.co 28 April 2017

Another related quality in order to copy the brand is the modular design of the websites. The modules on the left side contain summaries of articles with large headlines combined with images. The modules on the right side contain a space for text. Just like the ABC news website, the fake news website shows the most important story of the day in the largest module at the top of the page. While it is clearly visible that the fake news website is more simplistic designed than the original of ABC news, they still have the same appearance. On the level of structure, the fake news website abcnews.com.com is definitely mimicking the website of ABC news.

Figure 4. Screenshot homepage abcnews.go.com 28 April 2017

40 On the level of graphic design, there are a lot of similarities between the two webpages. The first similarity is the choice of colour of the fake news website. Just like ABC news, the fake news website uses the colours blue and white as the dominant colour (Figure 3 and 4). Another striking similarity between the websites is the use of large headlines in combination with the images. The use of information graphics, as Cooke calls this combination of text and pictures, provides the essence of a news story and makes the story more visual, instead of only readable (34). On both websites, every news article contains a large image and the headline of the specific article (See figure 5 and 6). However, abcnews.go.com has the extra feature of using videos in every news article, making the story even more visible for the readers. With the mimicking of those important aesthetical elements of the traditional news station ABC news, the fake news website tries to acquire the trust of the viewers. By copying the brand of ABC news they want to fool the viewers into thinking that they are visiting the ‘real’ website of ABC news. The fake news website is, just like ABC news, luring the viewer with outstanding visuals, trying to play on the emotions of the viewers. This reach for emotions and the reach for building a relationship is done to create the largest amount of participation with the visitors on the website. The more the viewer reads and shares the stories, the higher the number of clicks and the larger the level of influence.

Figure 5. Screenshot homepage abcnews.com.co 28 April 2017

41

Figure 6. Screenshot homepage abcnews.go.com 28 April 2017

4.1.2 Rhetoric and Style

Two important factors of the aesthetics that attract the reader are the use of headlines and images. Those two methods of attracting people are mostly used to stimulate the clicking on the hypertexts links of the news articles. As mentioned in the previous chapter, this lure of the audience to click on a certain story is also referred to as click-bait (Chen, Conroy and Rubin Misleading Online Content: 15). According to Blom and Hansen the question: “what makes the reader click?” has become the most important question many journalists ask themselves (87). Headlines play a substantial role in the communication of the news towards the people. They serve to summarise the main idea of the article, giving the audience the opportunity to vastly scan a large number of articles on their topics and interests. The headlines most of the time give the reader an idea of what sort of article they are dealing with, a factual, entertaining or opinion article (Graney 148). They provide a context for the reader, guiding the reader in the selection and interpretation of the information (Ecker, et al 7). Stylistic and narrative strategies are used when making the headlines, to catch the reader’s attentions and play with their emotions. As journalists started to use this method of clicks and shares that drive the traffic and revenue, other publishers were going to mimic these strategies. This resulted in a situation where a big group of online journalists and other producers of content would race after the best (most of the time untrue) stories, that capture the attention of the audience, leading the journalists towards a higher potential of value (Silverman 2015: 69).

42 Narrative strategies are used in order to get the attention of the audience. The use and placement of words in the headlines of news articles is not something that is done at random, the placement of the words determines what sort of article the readers deal with. When analysing the headlines of articles written on the websites abcnews.go.com and abcnews.com.co differences in the formulation of the headlines are visible. Silverman mentions the five most ‘hedging’ words in headlines that are used in untrue articles. “Rounding out the top five were: report (and its variations) (…), use of quotes around a claim (…), say (and its variations) (…), use of a question (…), and claim (and its variations) (…)” (2015: 122). Many words the fake news website uses in the headlines can be connected to this top five. When analysing the headlines of the fake news website questions, quotes and claims are the most common formulations. Both headlines that differ from the journalistic techniques and headlines that mimic the journalistic techniques are used by the fake news website. Their use of questions and quotes differ from the techniques that ABC news uses. Examples of question headlines from the fake news website are: “Serious Questions Ahead – Will the Digital Economy Survive Cybercrime?,” “Federal GMO labelling: Is it a good thing?,” and “Is ‘Trump Bump’ an economic mirage?“ (abcnews.com.co). Chen, Conroy and Rubin confirm the use of questions in headlines a problematic news practice. Questions in headlines have the goal to let the reader believe an unsubstantiated claim (News in an Online World: n.pag.). The questions are thus used to make the unverified information more trustful, as it is unlikely that the readers of the headlines would question what is written in the headlines (Silverman 2015: 123). Another technique that is most of the time not used by the ‘real’ journalists is the use of quotes in headlines. Examples of quotes used in the headlines of the fake news website are: “Donald Trump Protester Speaks Out: ‘I Was Paid $3,500 To Trump’s Rally’”, “Omar Mateen’s Final Text To Wife Released: ‘I’m Gay, That’s Why I’m Doing This’”, and “Ted Cruz: ‘I Will Endorse Donald Trump For President If He Makes Masturbation Illegal’” (abcnews.com.co). The use of quotes exemplifies that they try to convey its level of veracity (Silverman 2015: 123). A spectacular narrative is created, a narrative in which people publish confessions that are often ‘shocking’ and ‘exciting’. This technique is used in order to attract the reader with sensationalism, making the readers exited to read the article. Lastly, claims are frequently used in the headlines. Some examples of claim headlines from the fake news website are: “Facebook Buys Snapchat For Five Billion Dollars”, “President Obama Signs Executive Order Banning The Sale Of Assault Weapons”, “Neverland Ranch: Michael Jackson Kept Stockpile of Child Pornography At Home”, and New McDonald’s In Scottsdale Run Entirely By Robots” (abcnews.com.co). As those claims all come from the fake news website, it can be assumed that those claims are not true, but by formulating them as claims they look like fact-based headlines. Formulating the headlines as claims is a form that

43 comes the closest to the way the journalists writing for abcnews.go.com formulate them. Their headlines are formulated as a claim that summarizes the facts that are presented in the article. “Notre Dame students walk out on Mike Pence during commencement speech”, “Trump calls on Middle Eastern nations to 'drive out' extremists in first major speech abroad”, and “State of emergency declared in Ind. county due to flooding” (abcnews.go.com). Almost all of the articles are formulated in this style, a couple of them contain a question mark, but that number is negligible. The use of the same techniques of writing a headline as the ‘real’ journalists creates the blur between the content of the two websites. The readers cannot see the difference between headlines from the ‘real’ news website and headlines from the fake news website. Claims are thus used in order to create the same emotions and contribute to the mimicking of the brand ABC news. Another difference between the headlines of the two websites is the addressing of the reader. Almost all articles on the fake news website abcnews.com.co use headlines that address the reader personally. “How to become more effective as manager”, “The fundamentals of personal loans you must learn”, “What kind of insurance coverage do you need when shipping overseas”, and “Guide to getting a debt consolidation loan with poor credit” (abcnews.com.co). All those headlines are focussed on helping the reader and solving their problems. The appeal of the audience as an individual fits into the new journalistic environment, where attracting the audience to the ‘brand’ of the news website became really important. By addressing the individual consumers, it is easier to reach their emotions and get their attention. The formulation of headlines plays an important role in seeing the differences or similarities between the ‘real’ news articles and the fake news articles. It is clear that the fake news headlines are focussed more on luring the audience into clicking on the article than the ‘real’ news headlines. Most of the ‘real’ news headlines present a clear, fact-based and summarising claim. Fake news headlines use different formulations as questions, quotes, claims and the personal addressing of the readers to attract the reader. The second factor that manipulates the emotions of the readers is the use of strategically placed images. Chen, Conroy and Rubin argue that this placement of images can often be misleading for the readers. The readers automatically integrate the headlines with the images and made their own conclusion on stories, that most of the times were not true (Misleading Online Content: 17).

Like headlines, images can serve to attract attention and are usually processed before the full article is read, likely in close temporal proximity with reading of the headline. We therefore assumed that people would spontaneously infer that a photo of a person would be that of a person referred to in the headline and the initial section of the article (Ecker et al 19).

44 The images are thus influencing the readers on their interpretation of the article. The image serves as bait that misleads the audience, as the readers link the image immediately to the content of the article. In order to compare the use of images on both websites, this part of the analysis will compare two stories on the same topic. Both articles are about the against Trump as the president of the United States and are written in November 2016 (See figures, 7 and 8 (see page 47 and 48)). When analysing the two images of the protesting crowds, it stands out that they both emit a different feeling. The image included in the article produced by abcnews.go.com depicts a more positive message on protesting than the image used by the fake news website. The image on ABC news shows a message of peace, through the use of different signs. The American flag with a peace sign in the left corner has a dominant position in the picture. Furthermore, the protesters are photographed from the front side, showing their faces, creating an open image. The picture shows people from different genders, skin colours and age, giving a more positive image of the protesters (see figure 8). These signs together form an image that let the reader believe that the protest went peaceful without any disturbance. Figure 7 shows the image that is placed in the article of abcnews.com.co. This image emits a different message than figure 8, as it shows a demonstration against Trump from another perspective. Patriotism is a dominant aspect of this picture. The use of many American flags in combination with showing the president of America depicts the discourse of patriotism. Beside this patriotic message of pro-America, protesting is showed in a negative discourse. On the image two protesters are placed in a crowd of Trump supporters. They carry a banner with the text: “Trump makes America hate again”, the word hate in the sentence diffuses a more aggressive message. Only the faces of Trump and the two protesters are shown on the picture, the rest of the crowd is facing towards the where Trump gives a speech. This depicts a negative discourse that is created around protesting in the United States of America. As many American never joined a protest, their attitude towards demonstrations is often sceptic and full of prejudices (Herrnson and Weldon n.pag.). The image confirms the condemnation most citizens of the United States have on demonstrating. The patriotic discourse, in combination with the word ‘hate’ on the protest poster, and by placing the protesters in a crowd of Trump supporters together forms a more negative appearance than the image used by ABC news. A negative image of the protesters against Trump is created in order to make the readers believe more in the negative discourse on protesting. The emotions of the readers are manipulated by both of the images, as both of them emit a message about the protesters. Taking into account the anti-patriotic discourse, the message of peace and the diversity of people, the image used by abcnews.go.com creates a different context around protesting. The negative image many citizens have on protesting is

45 counteracted with this image. The image used by the fake news website abcnews.com.co shows a discourse of patriotism and confirms the negative preconception of the people. It is likely that the readers of this image are pushed towards creating more negative emotions on demonstrating against their United States. The attention of the audience is grabbed by the use of headlines and images. In the race to collect the largest number of readers, the truthfulness of the headlines declined in importance. Where the fake news website tried to mimic the graphic design of abcnews.go.com in order to copy their brand, their use of rhetoric and style focuses more on attention grabbing then on the mimicking of the aesthetics. They reach the emotions of the readers, by using extreme, shocking and outstanding headlines and images.

As described in this chapter, the aesthesis play an important role in transferring the emotions on the readers. First of all, the mimicking of the graphic design of abcnews.go.com by the fake news website shows that the fake news website tries to take over the brand of ABC news. This brand copying works in their favour, because the emotional connections of the readers are transferred with it. Besides the mimicking of the graphic design aesthetics, there are differences in the use of aesthetics on the level of rhetoric and style. The analysis of the headlines and images of two news articles showed that both websites try to catch the attention of the readers in a different way. ABC news mostly uses one technique of writing headlines, where the fake news website uses multiple techniques. The fake news websites focus more on the shocking effect, individual appeal, and sensationalism in the formulation of their headlines in order to reach the audience. The ‘real’ news website focuses more on the use of images and videos, making the story visible for the audience. In the analysis of the images, it is shown that the use of images also differs between both websites. The use of different signs in the images makes that they both transmit another image on the protests against Trump.

46

Figure 7.. Image of protesters included in the article “Donald Trump Protester Speaks Out: “I Was Paid $3,500 To Protest Trump’s Rally” on abcnews.com.co

47

Figure 8. Image of protesters included in the article “Tens of Thousands Protest Trump Election Victory, 124 Arrested” on abcnews.go.com

48 5

The Solutions

In the journalistic environment where truth is not the main focus anymore, the journalistic standards lose their power and the quality of the news is diminishing. In the post-truth society where objective facts are less important in forming public opinion, emotions and personal opinions triumph over truth and determine what information and news the public receives (Newman 2017: 3). Both news producers and news consumers need help in navigating within this age of post-truth in order to filter the facts from the lies. A critical approach is needed in order to complete this task. Journalists need to be critical of the information they collect; the readers need to be critical of the content they read. So far this thesis has explored the reasons for the rise of fake news as well as its modes of distribution and aesthetic characteristics. This chapter focuses on the solutions that can solve the problem that fake news causes. Solutions are found on many different levels all over the world. Governments are taking action, the online environment is making adaptations, journalists are working on combating fake news, and also the consumers are contributing in this process. In the last couple of years more and more steps are taken in order to battle the spread of fake news stories. This chapter will explore the solutions in the online environment, on the political level and in the journalistic field.

5.1 The Online Solutions

The first step that can be taken in order to fight fake news is to create sources that confirm and label that certain news is fake (Lazer et al. 3). This solution falls into the category of human , as it relies on trained professionals who judge and analyse the news articles on their facts (Woolf n.pag.). Many different parties in the online world contribute to this fact checking activity. Websites are specially created with the purpose of checking the facts of online news articles. Examples of the most popular websites are Teyit.org – “a verification platform that scans, choses, investigates suspicious information and delivers them to readers by turning them into analyses” (Teyit n.pag.). Factcheck.org – “a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania”. They try to reduce the confusion in U.S. Politics caused by fake news (The 10 Best Fact Checking Sites Mediabias: n.pag.). Snopes – the oldest and largest fact checking website (Snopes n.pag.). According to a report form the Reuters Institute for the Study

49 of Journalism most of the fact checking websites arose within the last two years and they predicted that the number of services like this will explode in the coming years. In order to support these fact checking activities big platforms are supporting these services (Newman 2017: 8). For example, Google is labelling fact-checked news articles in Google News to make sure that the people understand the value of what they are reading (Gingras n.pag.). Google is not the only platform that takes the problem serious. Facebook as one of the most important distributor of fake news, came up with solutions for the problem. Recently they admitted that they had seen political propaganda spread on the platform, so they had to increase their attention to the problem. On the level of human editing Facebook is taking the biggest step in fighting fake news. “Facebook has announced plans to outsource fact checking to services like Snopes, the Washington Post and PolitiFact and to algorithmically integrate these with the news feed” (Newman 2017: 8). Also they give the users the opportunity to flag fake news and alert Facebook to possible fake news stories (Jamieson n.pag., Zuckerberg n.pag.). Facebook will alert the readers of the fake news story with a label that mentions “Disputed by third party fact- checkers” (Jamieson n.pag.). Besides the human editing also the algorithms are adapted to filter fake news out of the newsfeed. The social media platform can integrate specific codes in order to let the algorithm stop the spread of fake news (Wendling n.pag.). One of the latest actions of Facebook in order to create awareness about fake news, is the spread of advertisements in English newspapers about recognizing fake news stories. The ads were spread in papers like The Times, The Guardian and Daily Telegraph. With the upcoming elections in England, Facebook tries to warn people about fake news stories in order to prevent that those stories will influence the outcome of the elections (Facebook Publishes Fake News Ads BBC: n.pag.). The social media platform Twitter also changed their interface in order to make it easier for the users to filter unqualified news. They released a new ‘mute’ button that gives the users the opportunity to manage the quality and type of news they receive on their timeline (Newman 2017: 8). The online world that created an environment in which fake news stories could be spread easily, takes its responsibility and helps in solving the problem. Fact checking is an important measure to stop the spread of false stories. Human knowledge is used to check all the facts and flag fake news when detected. Social media platforms as Facebook use these fact checking services to flag the stories spread on their platforms. All these actions are taken in order to raise awareness for the risks of fake news and to minimize their influence.

50 5.2 The Government Interferes

Many politicians are concerned about the spread of fake news stories, as those stories can work as propaganda to influence people’s opinion. Obama mentioned in his farewell speech, the danger of the echoing of news and false news that puts people in their own bubble. “We have become so secure in our bubbles, that we started accepting only information, whether it is true or not, that fits our opinion, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there” (NBC News: President Barack Obama's Farewell Speech, YouTube). Obama expressed his concerns about the role of social media as the news source for many people. Hillary Clinton also mentioned the danger of fake news. In her post-election appearance she challenged the congress to attack and combat fake news (Kane n.pag.). Unfortunately, the current president does not yet face the problem. Trump is mostly seen as part of the problem instead as a part of the solution. Not only politicians in the US are worried about the dangers of fake news, also in the rest of the world the problem is recognized. Fake news was also an important point of discussion in the European parliament. In April 2017 they had a debate on how to tackle fake news online (Fake news: How to, European Parliament News: n.pag.). One outcome was giving more money and resources for fighting fake news coming from (How to fight 'fake news', Aljazeera: n.pag.). In January England started a research into the possible solutions on fake news. “The Culture, Media and Sport Committee are looking at ways to respond to the phenomenon of fake news (…)” ('Fake news' inquiry launched, parliament UK: n.pag.). In France, the recently elected president of France, Macron, tried to prevent the spread of fake news stories during his campaign by banning the Russian news media Sputnik and RT TV from his events. The reason for Macron to ban these two Russian news media is because they are accused of spreading fake news (Emmanuel Macron’s campaign, The Guardian: n.pag.) Also outside of Europe fake news is being taken seriously. The Government of Singapore is seriously considering ways to address the problem of fake news. They argue that fake news can be used as a weapon by foreign countries. In order to prevent this to happen, they want to come up with penalties against the authors of fake news stories (Koh n.pag.). Fake news is thus a very accurate topic in contemporary politics, however most of the countries did not come to a solution for this problem yet. One of the leaders within this political discussion about how to solve the problem of fake news is the German government. Angela Merkel, the current chancellor in Germany said: “Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls – things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms, and we have to learn to deal with them.” Germany is the first country that decided to come in action by involving the government into the problem. They formed a new bill that punishes social networking sites with a fine when they fail to remove illegal content such as

51 hate speeches and fake news articles. This fine could go up to 50 million euros (Germany Approves Bill, CNBC: n.pag.). Germany has the leading role when it comes to regulating the fight against fake news. Other countries share their concerns, but have not yet come to any solutions. As Obama mentioned the dangers of the spread of the false stories, his successor Donald Trump thinks differently about the whole problem. In the United States it is up to the social media platforms, the journalists and the consumers of the news to fight fake news.

5.3 Journalists are Fighting Back

As the environment is changing towards a post-truth age where facts can no longer be trusted, it is the task of the journalists to focus more on fact checking, balance and accuracy. This is a difficult task as journalists deal with untruthful powerful people, political polarisation, lower levels of trust in the media, and the decrease of resources (Rusbridger, Nielsen, and Skjeseth n.pag.). In order to restrain these factors and fight the spread of misinformation, objective and fact-based reporting is substantial. An important act that helps to fight misinformation is fact checking. Besides the checking of the facts, it is also important that the journalistic values are guarded. Developing a critical role towards the journalistic field is important to keep the focus on the quality of journalism. The Reuter Institute on the study of Journalism published an article on how journalists should do their work in the environment of lies. They argue that in a world where powerful people, as Donald Trump, have the intention to lie, it is the task of the journalists to deal with this and find the truth. They give a couple of tips on how journalists could fight fake news. One of the most important suggestions is to get out of your own bubble of official sources and insider group thinking. Also it is important for journalists to collaborate, share trustful sources with each other and label false statements as being false (Rusbridger, Nielsen, and Skjeseth n.pag.). A lot of journalists are working on these issues of reporting the truth. The Washington Post started with fact checking of the tweets from president Trump. They provide the reader a context around the story, labelling the tweets as incorrect or false and giving more information about the topic of the tweet itself (Bump n.pag.). The Washington Post also created a fact checker that checks the statements of political figures (Kessler n.pag.). The New York Times checked facts during the Presidential Campaign in 2016 and produced them on their website (Fact Checks, The New York Times: n.pag.). Increasingly more journalists participate in fighting the lies that are spread by fake news producers, important figures and other journalist in order to increase the trust in journalism.

52 It is hard for journalists to be critical on their own work as reporting form a critical perspective takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money (Rusbridger, Nielsen, and Skjeseth n.pag.). Therefore it is important that other parties take over this role to critique the standing conventions of journalism. Satire news can be seen as a type of parody that comments on the content of mainstream journalism. More people are turning to these satire news shows or websites to get their information and news, so the importance of this genre is increasing (Baym 260, Cushion 97). Despite the fact that satire cannot be seen as a form of journalism, they do add important value to the journalistic environment. Because they do not have to follow the journalistic standards, they have the possibility to be critical on the conventions set for journalism. “Fake news allows journalists and others to re-examine the conventions that have been handed down to journalists, discover historically grounded alternative performances, and conceivably enhance the current pursuit of journalistic integrity” (Borden and Tew 303). With their critical approach towards the news, satire news shows contribute to the . Their form of communication with the audience promotes the public debate about important topics. Through their satirical approach they raise questions about what is said and done by powerful authorities, and thus can be seen as gatekeepers of the press (Baym 269, Borden and Tew 309). Through this critical approach the satire news shows provide the journalists new insight in their use of objectivity, facts and values, something that can be used in their fight against fake news.

This chapter showed that during the last few years many steps were taken in the fight against the spread of lies and fake news stories. People are getting more aware of the dangers of fake news and are getting trained in recognising lies, hoaxes and fake news articles. Fact checking websites and social media platforms are working on labelling of fake stories. Governments are trying to accelerate this process by regulating filtering of fake news and journalist are working on their own profession by reintroducing the importance of fact-based and objective reporting. Consumers, social media platforms, journalists and governments are working together on solutions for the increasing problem of fake news. As the problem is not solved yet, the first steps are taken in recreating a journalistic environment of trust.

53

Conclusion

This thesis investigated the phenomenon fake news by exploring the historical conditions, the distribution, the aesthetical characteristics and the possible solutions. It started with an overview of the major changes the journalistic environment has been subjected to over the last three centuries. Chapter one stated that the journalistic standards of objective, truthful, independent and fact-based writing started to make its entrance with the arrival of the penny press. These standards developed itself into more structured values in the period of New Journalism. At the end of the 19th-century events were not only reported anymore, storytelling became also important. It has been demonstrated that with the arrival of the mediums radio (1920) and television (1940), the standards of journalism were developed even further into the way we identify them now. Radio created a new relationship with their audience, as they would receive information about what was happening in their country more directly. Television intensified this relationship with the viewer as it brought the audience a visualized version of the news. In chapter two it has been elaborated that this news environment was subject to change with the arrival of certain media technological inventions. Cable and satellite changed the television into a more commercialised medium. The news was speeded up and the focus shifted towards entertainment. By exploring these changes it is demonstrated that the news stations started to focus on the quantity of news instead of the quality. 24-Hour News stations were created, giving the audience a continuous flow of information. The downside of this fast pace of news reporting was that the need to report a more in-depth story disappeared. The news was repeated instead of giving the audience more information. A second factor in the delusion of the journalistic standards was the blur between information and entertainment. This blur between informing and entertaining content was a reaction to the decrease of interest of the audience in only informative content. Journalist changed their reporting style into a style that fitted the preferences of the audience, giving up a part of their independency. Taken together, these developments suggest that the news had to be more sensational and entertaining. Opinions and emotions became the main criteria when it came to news reporting. It has been demonstrated that the third major finding that contributed to the delusion of the journalistic standards was the arrival of the Internet. The production and consumption of news changed dramatically within this online environment. News production was speeded up,

54 even more, reaching more people in a shorter period of time. Journalists could upload new articles directly, keeping the audience updated 24-h. The role of opinions and emotions in the production of news became more important, as the journalists would receive continuous feedback from the readers. The consumption of news changed as Internet transformed consumers into producers, by making the web interactive. This interactivity caused the arrival of citizen journalism. The audience now could talk back to the journalists or even produce news themselves. Within this online environment, the control on quality of news was not that strict anymore. Anyone could become a journalist, nobody had to follow the journalistic rules. Negligence of journalistic standards increased even more with the arrival of social media platforms. As more people started to use those platforms as news sources, journalists would shift their focus to produce news that would fit this environment. As these platforms are built on the interactive role of the users, the contribution of the consumers to the news increased. The more the users used their interactive role, the more the platforms knew about the preferences of the users. This strengthened the filter bubble of information. In the last part of chapter two it has been demonstrated that all these factors together have created an environment in which fake news could grow easily. The privilege of producing news shifted from journalists to everyone who has Internet access. This resulted in a perfect environment for fake news producers. Fake news producers can produce whatever they like, since more news content is based on opinions of journalists and is written according to the emotions of the audience. Furthermore, social media platforms allowed to spread content to a worldwide audience and made the stories easy accessible. In the first half of this thesis, I elaborated the historical conditions that created an environment in which fake news could grow. The second half examined the phenomenon of fake news more thorough. Chapter three showed how fake news is distributed on the Internet. Social media platforms play a crucial role in distributing fake news stories. The stories are spread via the personalised news feeds. The reason to spread fake news via social media platforms can be divided into an economic and political reason. From the economical point of view, fake news stories are produced to make money following the online revenue model of clicks. The newsfeeds of the social media platforms are used to spread the articles via hyperlinks, luring the users into clicking on the links to the websites. The political reason to produce fake news and spread it via the social media platforms is the fact that some of the fake news producers try to influences political conventions of specific countries by spreading political related false information. With the increase of people who use social media as their news source, it is easy for the fake news producers to influence the people’s understandings of important political issues. When the social media platforms continue the filtering of information according to the

55 preferences of the readers, instead of filtering on the quality of the content, the influencing of people’s opinion on political issues would carry on. In chapter four, I have performed an analysis of two fake news websites to demonstrate how fake news websites try to play on the emotions of the consumers. This focus on attention grabbing of the consumers is visible in the aesthetics of the fake news articles. The fake news websites mimic the aesthetics of the traditional news articles in order to make the consumers click. Screaming headlines and outstanding images are used to generate the highest traffic to their web pages. On the level of graphic design the fake news websites try to mimic the brand of the ‘real’ new website. The headlines and images often differ from the original news stations, as the fake news websites use extravagant techniques in order to grab the attention of the readers. This analysis showed that fake news websites try to mimic certain characteristics of the aesthetics of the ‘real’ news websites in order to create a relationship with the consumers, all in order to create as much attention as possible for their articles. This research has identified that fake and misleading news stories took over and influenced the journalistic environment. This can be partly related back to the changes that occurred in the journalistic field. Both the producers and the consumers of news made that the important journalistic values were deluded. In order to fight the spread of fake news, it is important that the post-truth society is brought back to an environment in which journalistic standards regain a leading role. As fake news will be part of the journalistic society it is important that both the journalists as the consumers of the news develop a critical view on all the content they produce and receive. With fake news as a consistently recurring topic in the contemporary news environment all over the world, it is important for researchers, journalists and consumers to know what fake news is and how it works. This research could be seen a guide in understanding the phenomenon of fake news. This is done by explaining how a phenomenon as fake news could occur, and what needs to be changed in order to fight the spread of misleading content. As this research only analysed fake news in a United States context, it is interesting to accomplish further research on the role of fake news in the rest of the world. Also, it would be interesting to go deeper into the effect of fake news on the politics of specific countries, in order to create a better understanding of the relation between fake content and politics.

56

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