A growing literature on the impact of “fake news“ accusations on legacy news outlets suggests that the use of this term is
part of a much larger trend of increased and delegitimizing media criticism by political actors. However, so far, there is very little
empirical evidence on how prevailing politicians’ delegitimizing media criticism really is and under which conditions it occurs. To fill
these gaps, we present results of a content analysis of media-related Facebook postings by Austrian and German politicians in 2017
(N = 2,921). The results suggest that media criticism, in general, is actually rare and that about half of it can be
described as delegitimizing (i.e., characterized by incivility or absence of argumentation). Most often, media criticism is used by populist
politicians, who accuse “the media” in general of bias and falsehoods.
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.