High-quality journalism in the face of Donald Trump's theory of electoral fraud: the information strategy of the media in the 2020 US presidential election (original) (raw)

2021, Profesional de la Información

The institutional political crisis is posited to be the great risk to societies in the twenty-first century. The instability of democracy, increasing misinformation during electoral processes, and distrust by citizens are facts that are confirmed by studies such as The Economist Intelligence Unit (2018) or Freedom in the World (2018). In the context of the most recent US election (3-N-2020), President Donald Trump activated a dialog focused on the denunciation of electoral fraud that mobilized the masses and culminated in an assault on the Capitol. In parallel, Twitter has endorsed the role of journalism (@ABC, @ AP, @CBSNews, @CNN, @FoxNews, @NBCNews, and @Reuters) as a gatekeeper to lies on the Internet. The objective of this study is to determine how the media treated the electoral process from their Twitter accounts, analyze which strategies they adopted to combat Trump's fallacy, and confirm the extent to which they contributed to the spread of this conspiracy theory. Using a general sample of tweets (n 1 = 3,577), we applied a comparative content analysis methodology with a triple (quantitative-qualitative-discursive) approach based on the use of keyword indicators (n 2 = 34,430). The results confirm that the media offered verified content on the electoral process, used various sources, and avoided reproducing Donald Trump's delegitimization discourse. In general, they fought together against the theory of electoral fraud, misinformation, and polarization of citizens, factors that have defined a scenario of doubt about the future of democracy.