Propaganda Techniques in Fake News Published by Serbian Mainstream Media

Abstract

Observing propaganda as an essential part of the mass-communication process, its techniques and characteristics are changing constantly, both verbally and visually, adapting to the new trends. As Philip Taylor noted, propaganda is ‘a deliberate attempt to persuade people to think and behave in a desired way’ which is based on ‘the conscious, methodical and planned decisions to employ techniques of persuasion designed to achieve specific goals that are intended to benefit those organizing the process’ (Taylor, 2013: 6). If we accept a definition of fake news offered by the Cambridge Dictionary which states that those are ‘false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke’, then the relation between the two terms becomes more prominent, especially in the modern age. In that context, the goal of this paper is to examine which propaganda aspects are dominant and in what way they are implemented into contemporary fake news, published in Serbian mainstream media. The theoretical framework will be based on findings of contemporary research in the domain of propaganda communication. Through the qualitative analysis approach the authors will conduct the research focusing on detecting and analyzing propaganda techniques used in confirmed fake news articles in Serbian mainstream media which were discovered and deconstructed by reliable and certified fact checkers (Raskrinkavanje and Fake news tragač). The unit of the analysis will be a deconstructed text which is labeled as fake news. The results of the research are expected to provide an insight into the mechanisms of creating and spreading fake news through popular mainstream media that still play an important role as a public opinion creation agent. Therefore, those results can be used as guidelines for detecting and combating fake news as well as raising awareness about media literacy as one of the most essential competencies today.