Framing the mass media: Exploring fake news as a frame embedded in political discourse

Abstract

The recent growth of alternative media sites and sources has also seen the rise of an aggressive rhetoric decrying mass media or parts thereof as being untrustworthy and politically biased. While it is unclear whether the fake news debate is directly connected with this, it is surely a framing of mass media. In this article, we use techniques of quantitative text analysis in order to analyse how the fake news frame is structured and to understand its central determinants in terms of social context and political orientation. Using quantitative text analysis, we analyse the frame usage and semantic embeddedness in eight blogs. We find evidence for a generalised frame that tends to be independent of political orientation of the blog.