Credulous folks. Moral Panic and Public Discourse around Fake News in France

Abstract

Since its first uses in the beginning of 2017, the term “fake news” has been the object of a relatively stable production of public, political or media narratives. Their abundance, as well as their alarmist or catastrophic nature came to justify the use of the expression “moral panic”, or “media panic”, to qualify this moment of collective concern about online misinformation and its negative consequences on individual behaviors. This article aims to interrogate and explore the application of the concept of moral panic to the “fake news crisis” through a corpus analysis of audiovisual broadcasts that focuses on this phenomenon in France between 2017 and 2019. It engages with the media fields of broadcasting, the positions of the guests of the programs, and the thematic framings which are developed there, such as the definition of the phenomenon, the causes and persons to blame, and the consequences on the public. It enables us to make sense of how this particular media sequence contributed to shaping the field of possibilities for public action in the fight against fake news.