Yoo, J. J., Lee, H., & An, S. (2026). The role of the term “fake news” in U.s. alternative media: Shaping political discourse and hyperpartisanship. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/10776990251410599
Summary
This paper examines how the phrase “fake news” is rhetorically deployed across two ideologically extreme U.S. alternative media outlets — Newsmax on the right and Occupy Democrats on the left — over an eight-year span (April 2015–October 2023). Rather than studying misinformation’s effects on audiences, the authors focus on the label itself, arguing that “fake news” functions predominantly as a weaponized term used to delegitimize ideological opponents rather than to describe fabricated content. Grounding the analysis in Egelhofer et al.’s two-dimensional typology and interpreting topic-modeling results through Hallin’s three-sphere model, the study shows that hyperpartisan outlets actively renegotiate the boundaries between consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance — recasting rival actors and mainstream narratives as illegitimate and thereby contributing to media fragmentation and polarization.
Key Contributions
- Shifts analytic attention from audience-level misinformation effects to the rhetorical deployment of the “fake news” label within partisan media.
- Extends Egelhofer et al.’s (2020) typology beyond mainstream journalism into ideologically extreme alternative media.
- Integrates Hallin’s macro-level sphere model with Egelhofer et al.’s micro-level typology to create a dual-level framework for analyzing weaponized discourse.
- Demonstrates methodological integration of manual content analysis with LDA topic modeling across large corpora.
- Draws practical implications for journalism ethics and media literacy, urging more cautious professional use of the term.
Methods
Mixed-methods design combining manual content analysis and computational topic modeling. Articles containing “fake news” were scraped (Python, BeautifulSoup) from both outlets, yielding a corpus of 2,536 Newsmax and 513 Occupy Democrats articles after filtering. A 30% stratified random sample (759 Newsmax, 154 Occupy Democrats) was hand-coded using a binary scheme based on Egelhofer et al.’s typology — disinformation genre, empty buzzword, weaponized label — plus actor-based categories, with strong intercoder reliability (Cohen’s κ = .84–.94). LDA topic modeling (R’s tm/topicmodels; preprocessing via NLTK and spaCy) produced k=11 topics for Newsmax and k=8 for Occupy Democrats, consolidated into higher-order themes and mapped onto Hallin’s three spheres.
Findings
- “Fake news” served as a weaponized label in 89.6% of Newsmax and 98.7% of Occupy Democrats articles (χ²=13.14, p<.001), and as an empty buzzword in nearly all articles across both outlets.
- Occupy Democrats deployed disinformation-genre framing more often (81.8%) than Newsmax (67.2%), and reported actors spreading disinformation in 96.1% vs. 73.5% of articles — using the term more aggressively as a counterstrategy.
- The term was more often used incidentally (64–71%) than as a main focus, marking it as a recurring rhetorical reference rather than a topic in itself.
- Newsmax themes targeted mainstream outlets (NYT, CNN, WaPo), framed Trump’s conflicts with the press, and invoked conspiracy and election-interference narratives; Occupy Democrats centered on Trump-era media conflict, Russian interference, and critiques of right-wing propaganda.
- Themes in both outlets fell predominantly within Hallin’s deviance sphere, with identical issues classified differently across outlets — supporting the fluidity of the spheres.
Connections
This study’s focus on the weaponization of “fake news” as a delegitimizing label connects to work on how disinformation discourse and its labeling shape epistemic authority, such as Farkas2026-lr and Hameleers2026-mc. Its concern with hyperpartisan alternative media as sites of polarization and boundary-work aligns with research on partisan news ecosystems like Frischlich2025-vn and Humprecht2025-ml, and its LDA-based content analysis of partisan rhetoric resonates methodologically with computational studies of polarized media discourse such as Balluff2026-if.
Podcast
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