Weapons of Mass Deception: How Right-wing Media Wage Information Warfare and Undermine American Democracy (Journalism and Political Communication Unbound)

Mistrust of the democratic electoral process has become rampant among Americans, particularly Republican voters.This trend carries profound consequences: widespread disputes over election results and resistance to the peaceful transfer of power threaten to undermine the very fabric of American democracy.It is, therefore, essential to understand why mistrust is spreading.No analysis is complete without a thorough accounting of the role of right-wing media in US politics. Weapons of Mass Deception challenges the conventional wisdom that right-wing media outlets like Breitbart News and Fox News function primarily as news organizations, using empirical analysis to demonstrate how they more closely resemble political organizations.Analyzing nearly four million online articles published by thirty major right-wing media outlets, Yunkang Yang finds that disinformation consistently ranked among the highest engagement stories between 2017 and 2020.Internal emails, Federal Election Commission fil