Headlines as Fake News: Discursive Deception in Serbia’s DailyInformer(2012–2018)

Abstract

Since the end of the wars of Yugoslav secession, and since Kosovo’s declaration of independence, the Balkans—Serbia included—have taken a back seat in academic research. Even though media freedoms have been severely stifled following the coming to power of Aleksandar Vučić in 2012, today’s Serbian media are still failing to become a topic for scholarly research. In this article, we scrutinize the daily Informer, the unofficial daily of Serbia’s strongman, president Vučić, via a discourse analysis of its headlines. As shall be shown, the Informer supports the reign of Aleksandar Vučić by framing him as a hero and martyr, fighting for the ‘people’, in a highly populist fashion, discursively painting the opposition in a highly negative light, as well as promoting warmongering and the idea that Serbia is surrounded by enemies. This is achieved via discursive deception, bases on assertive rhetoric, filled with exaggerations.

How online news headlines and accompanying images ‘translate’ a violent event: a cross-cultural case study

“…The selection of articles could be criticised as 'cherry-picking' (Jovanović 2018). However, it is licit because these earliest articles are immediate and influential shapers of audiences' impressions of the event, as mentioned above; and this preliminary analysis is a useful starting point or litmus test for determining whether it is worth using this methodology with the full corpus of headlines, and/or other corpora.…”

“…It is certainly an aspect of news headlines that warrants further research. 6 For this reason, the DT26 headline is 'inaccurate or "hyped"' (Jovanović, 2018;Caulfield & Bubela, 2004), but also consonant (recall the news value) with the expectations and prejudices of many readers. 7 The Swiss Courrier was not taken into account in the analysis of images due to a potential data collection flaw.…”

Discursive Governmental and Media Response to Covid-19: The Case of Serbia

“…Borrowing from Puzynina (Puzynina 1992), he defines deception as "an attempt to affect the target in such a way that her or his behavior/action is an instrument of attaining the goals of the manipulator, who acts without using force but in such a way that the target does not know the goal of the manipulator's action" (Galasinski 2000:21). Deceiving the public by presenting a hectic pastiche of contradictory evidence would go well in presenting the government as facing a tough adversary, which has so far figured heavily in the deception tactics used by the government-supporting media (Jovanović 2018c). Furthermore, and also in agreement with the deceptive tactics used before, this discursive strategy sends the message that Vučić himself is suffering in order to help his people; after all, he is personally procuring respirators by putting himself at risk for not going through official, state channels.…”

“…Yet again painting a target on himself, he "confessed" that all of it was "his fault", yet it remained unclear what exactly was his fault. Evasion, exaggeration, presenting oneself as a victim: these are the crucial moments in Vučić's discourse that has been present in the public for years (Jovanović 2018a, Jovanović 2018c.…”

A New Political Scarecrow? The Political Program and Activity of the ”Serbian Right“

“…With Serbia's President Vučić -former member of the right-wing Serbian Radical Party and long-time warmonger -the country has taken significant strides backwards as a fledgling democracy. Vučić himself is increasingly referred to as a dictator in the media (Eror, 2019) and semi-authoritarian in scholarship (Radeljić, 2019), and the country's freedoms have started to erode manifestly, arguably most notably in the domain of the increasingly restricted freedom of the press (FreedomHouse, 2016(FreedomHouse, , 2017Jovanović, 2018c;Kmezic, 2018). The protests against his regime have seen some scant interest within the academic community (Fridman & Hercigonja, 2017;Jovanović, 2019a), including rare pieces on the development of Serbia's Right Wing through the decades (Jovanović, 2018b).…”