Speaker: Roman Horbyk, Post-doctoral researcher at Umeå University
Discussant: Kjetil Duvold, Associate Professor in Political Science, Dalarna University
Chair: Olena Podolian, Doctoral Candidate in Political Science, Södertörn University

Disinformation cultures: Comparative analysis of narrative conventions in English and Russian-language “fake news”

Much attention has recently been devoted to “fake news”, its circulation patterns, potential impact, and a political economy behind its business model. However, one rather neglected aspect is approaching “fake news” – defined here as verifiably false information distributed strategically and virally – from the perspective of genre and narrative.

I argue that this would reveal how “fake news” arises from the possibilities within “real” news by imitating journalist narrative techniques. Using Barnhurst and Nerone’s theory of “journalist modernism” (based on Althusser’s interpretation of form as ideology), I focus on narrative conventions in an extensive sample of several hundred recent news stories in English and Russian identified as completely made-up by credible fact-checkers in order to propose an internal typology of “fake news” and compare the structures in the narratives specific to different languages, journalist traditions, media systems, and cultures. The narratological analysis points out a presence of context-specific narrative “scripts” used to redress the text’s fictionality.