Disinformation and the Brussels bubble: EU correspondents’ concerns and competences in a digital age

Autor(en)

Sophie Lecheler, Gattermann Katja, Loes Aaldering

Abstrakt

European Union (EU) political actors have been heavily affected by the so-called disinformation crisis, leading to intense worries about how EU citizens may be guaranteed access to trustworthy information in the years to come. While there is increasing research on how EU officials, platforms, and political parties react to the threat of disinformation, less attention has been paid to how another crucial group of actors in Brussels copes with this threat: EU correspondents. This paper presents one of the first empirical observations of EU correspondents’ perceptions of the disinformation crisis. We conducted a survey with Brussels-based correspondents ahead of a politicized 2019 European Parliament election campaign, and asked: What are (a) the concerns and (b) self-perceived competences these correspondents have in dealing with disinformation? Our study offers two main take-aways: First, we recommend further studying EU journalism as a complex organism whose concerns and competences are influenced by intra-European differences in press freedom and journalistic professionalisation. Second, disinformation studies in the EU context must no longer neglect the challenges professional journalism faces when aiming to stop false content.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft

Externe Organisation(en)

University of Amsterdam (UvA), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Journal

Journalism

Anzahl der Seiten

18

ISSN

1464-8849

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849231188259

Publikationsdatum

07-2023

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

508009 Medienforschung, 508014 Publizistik, 508020 Politische Kommunikation

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Communication, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)

Link zum Portal

https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/disinformation-and-the-brussels-bubble-eu-correspondents-concerns-and-competences-in-a-digital-age(19664af3-d9fa-4f4d-a6fa-f778a8d29066).html