Suspicious stories: taking narrative seriously in disinformation research

Sadler, N. (2026). Suspicious stories: taking narrative seriously in disinformation research. Communication Theory. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaf013

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Summary

Sadler argues that disinformation research has treated the concept of “narrative” loosely and intuitively, reducing stories to plot summaries whose meanings are self-evident and whose value can be judged on a true/false axis. Against this, he advances a hermeneutic realist approach—drawing on Ricoeur’s threefold mimesis and narratology—in which stories disclose aspects of reality rather than simply mirroring or constructing it. Coupled with Phelan’s narrative ethics, this framework lets analysts evaluate both the ethics of the told and the ethics of the telling. The argument is demonstrated through a close reading of Spanish-language tweets by Venezuelan influencer Roi López Rivas that blame NATO enlargement for Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, showing how content can be referentially and ethically problematic without being straightforwardly false.

Key Contributions

• A theoretically grounded definition of narrative (temporally and causally related happenings) that distinguishes it from the discourses, themes, and structures loosely labelled “narratives” in the field.
• Introduces hermeneutic realism as a middle path between naïve realism and constructivism for disinformation studies.
• Adapts Phelan’s narrative ethics—the ethics of the told vs. the telling, and the triad of reporting/interpreting/evaluating—into an analytical framework for suspect narratives.
• A worked method combining fabula/sjuzhet analysis with ethical appraisal, applied to a non-elite, Spanish-language, Global South case underrepresented in the literature.
• Challenges the field’s “cryptonormativity” by making evaluative criteria explicit and defeasible.

Methods

Primarily conceptual and theoretical synthesis, drawing on Ricoeur, Bakhtin’s dialogism, and narratological work by Bal, Chatman, and Genette, alongside a critical review of qualitative/quantitative disinformation studies and the “strategic narrative” tradition. This is applied in a single-case qualitative analysis of five Spanish-language tweets (Feb 2022–Aug 2023) by Roi López Rivas. The analytical procedure moves between fabula and sjuzhet to identify what is reported, interpreted, and evaluated—including disnarrated and sideshadowed events—before appraising the narrative on both referential and ethical grounds.

Findings

• The tweets contain few outright false statements, relying instead on imprecision, ambiguous referents, and quotation of others’ voices to avoid direct commitment.
• Sideshadowing attributes agency and contingency to the US/NATO while disnarrating Russian agency, producing a deterministic account in which Russia “had no other option.”
• Apparent multivocality (quoting Putin, Biden, Stoltenberg, Brand) functions monologically, channelling diverse voices toward a single interpretation despite a professed commitment to multipolarity.
• Evaluation is delivered implicitly through presupposed moral principles applied asymmetrically to Russia and the US.
• The result is a narrative that is referentially and ethically problematic—reductive, Manichean, disingenuous—without being demonstrably false.
• Counter-disinformation materials, such as NATO’s own debunking pages, can mirror these same ethically problematic simplifications.

Connections

This paper contributes to a growing body of critical and conceptual work questioning the true/false framing dominant in the field; it resonates with definitional and normative critiques of disinformation such as Marwick2025-ov and Marwick2026-qd, and with work on the strategic and rhetorical dimensions of manipulative content like Hameleers2026-mc. Its focus on narrative disclosure and ethics stands somewhat apart from the field’s largely quantitative and platform-analytic mainstream, offering a humanistic counterpoint to that tradition.