Academic literature on the topic 'Governors Advertising, Political Mass media and public opinion'

One of the most crucial decisions political candidates make ahead of an election is whether they want to focus on their image or that of their their political opponents in their advertisement (Lau and Rovner , 2009). During electoral campaigns, candidates need to decide whether they use political advertisement to display a positive image of themselves or whether they try to make the opponent look bad. The first strategy is referred to as Acclaim or Positive Ads. The second approach, according to Surlin and Gordon is called Negative Campaigning and is applied by a political candidate when (s)he “attacks the other candidate personally, the issues for which the other candidate stands, or the party of the other candidate” (1977, p. 93). However, measuring negative campaigning poses a challenge to academic research since content analyses often fail to address the grey areas of this concept. To begin with, many political ads compare positive characteristics of a candidate against opponents’ more negative ones. (Lau & Rovner, 2009). Ads that contain both strategies, shedding positive light on the candidate while also highlighting negative aspects about the opponent’s character or policies are called Comparison or Comparative Ads. These comparisons are difficult to code with straightforward approaches. For example, analyzing campaigns along a positive/negative dichotomy by discounting attacks to the opponent from positive self-presentations may equate strongly positively and negatively charged political advertising to neutral campaigns. Also, negativity in political campaigning is studied in different contexts and has been extended as a number of studies on negative campaigning look in particular at Attacks and Rebuttals/Defense from opponents after an attack (Benoit, 2000; Benoit & Airne, 2009; Erigha & Charles, 2012; Lee & Benoit, 2004; Torres, Hyman, & Hamilton, 2012). This distinction raises other important methodological and theoretical implications. Sweeping measures of negativity based on common scholarly definitions do not consider voters’ tolerance towards the use of certain forms of negativity by candidates (for example, rebutting an attack from an opponent) that may be perceived as legitimate. Not accounting for such nuances is what makes many negativity measures unable to accurately gauge the effects of negative campaigning among the electorate (Sigelman & Kugler, 2003). Field of application/theoretical foundation: Negative campaigning and its related constructs (such as attacks or rebuttals) have been often associated with current trends in political communication of modernization and professionalization of election campaigns (Voltmer, 2004). Negative campaigning is indeed a development that can be observed across many different political contexts (Kaid & Holtz-Bacha, 2006). Campaign strategies using negative messages about a political opponent have been studied relying on theories from social and cognitive psychology (Kahn & Kenney, 1999; Lau, 1985) and mostly in regard to their potential consequences for a healthy democracy (Lau & Rovner, 2009). Their operationalization follows a simple schema by coding whether a certain construct is present in a given advertising piece or not. Alternatively, it is coded which kind of category best reflects on the content of a given political advertisement. References/combination with other methods of data collection: Negative campaigning and related constructs have been studied through content analysis both of paid advertisement (Benoit, 2000) and news coverage by the mass media (Lau & Pomper, 2004); The features and effects of negative campaigning have also been analyzed through voter surveys (Brader, 2005, 2006) and interviews with campaign managers (Kahn & Kenney, 1999). Its effects were furthermore more precisely measured through numerous experimental studies (Ansolabehere, Iyengar, Simon, & Valentino, 1994; overview see: Lau et al., 2007). Example studies: Table 1: Overview exemplary studies measuring of negative campaigning and related constructs Authors Sample Unit of analysis Constructs Values Reliability Benoit (2000), Benoit & Airne (2009), Lee & Benoit (2004) Television ads, direct mail, newspaper ads, and candidate web pages Acclaim Acclaims portray the sponsored candidate in a favorable light, both his/her character and/or policy (Benoit, 2000, 281, 295) 0 = not present 1 = present Cohen’s kappa average = .96 Erigha & Charles (2012) Television and web advertisements Non-negative/ advocacy A non-negative/advocacy ad favors a party’s candidate, focusing solely on that individual. 1 = non-negative / advocacy 2 = comparison 3= attack ads (exclusive options) Cohen’s kappa average = .96 Torres et al. (2012) Presidential candidate–sponsored TV ads Non-comparative ad If the ad simply mentions positive attributes of a particular candidate without mentioning an opponent, the ad is coded as a non-comparison (positive) ad (p. 196) 1 = comparative ad 2 = negative ad 3= non-comparative ad (exclusive options) Cohen’s kappa average = .98 Steffan & Venema (2019) Campaign posters Textual negative campaigning Visual negative campaigning Based on Lau and Pomper’s (2002), textual/visual negative campaiging indicates whether the image / text on the campaign posters referred to other political parties or candidates. (p. 273) 0 = not present 1 = present Visual negative campaigning: Krippendorff’s α = .82 Textual negative campaigning: Krippendorff’s α = .84 Torres et al. (2012) Presidential candidate–sponsored TV ads Negative ad If the ad criticizes the opposing party and/or candidate but offers no alternative (in essence, the ad presents negative information about an opponent but no information about the candidate on whose behalf it is run), then the ad is coded as a negative ad. 1 = comparative ad 2 = negative ad 3= non-comparative ad (exclusive options) Cohen’s kappa average = .98 Ceccobelli (2018) Facebook posts Negative rhetorical strategy The posts taken into consideration are those in which leaders employ a purely negative campaigning strategy. Cases in which a hypothetic leader A attacks one or more political opponents by comparing his/her own figure or policy proposal with the one(s) of her/his competitor(s) are not coded, since they denote a comparative rhetorical strategy (p. 129) 0 = not present 1 = present Krippendorff’s α average = .85 Benoit (2000), Benoit & Airne (2009), Lee & Benoit (2004) Television spots, direct mail pieces, newspaper ads, and candidate web pages Attack Portrays the opposing candidate in an unfavorable light, both his/her character and/or policy (Benoit, 2000, 281, 295) 0 = not present 1 = present Cohen’s kappa average = .96 Erigha & Charles (2012) Television and web advertisements Attack ads Attack ads criticize the opposing candidate without referencing the sponsoring party’s candidate (p. 443) 1 = non-negative / advocacy 2 = comparison 3= attack ads (exclusive options) Cohen's kappa average = .96 Benoit (2000), Benoit & Airne (2009), Lee & Benoit (2004) Television spots, direct mail pieces, newspaper ads, and candidate web pages Defense Defense responds to (refutes) an attack on the candidate, both on his/her character and/or policy (Benoit, 2000, 281, 295) 0 = not present 1 = present Cohen’s kappa average = .96 Erigha & Charles (2012) Television and web advertisements Comparison A comparison ad weighs two credentials, characteristics, or policystances (p. 443) 1 = non-negative / advocacy 2 = comparison 3= attack ads (exclusive options) Cohen's kappa average = .956 Torres et al. (2012) Presidential candidate–sponsored TV ads Comparative ad If the ad criticizes the opposing party and/or candidate and recommends alternative courses of action by comparing two candidates on specific points so as to present one in a more positive and the other in a more negative light, then the ad is coded as a comparative ad (p. 195) 1 = comparative ad 2 = negative ad 3= non-comparative ad (exclusive options) Cohen’s kappa average = .98 References Ansolabehere, S., Iyengar, S., Simon, A., & Valentino, N. (1994). Does Attack Advertising Demobilize the Electorate? American Political Science Review, 88(4), 829–838. https://doi.org/10.2307/2082710 Benoit, W. L. (2000). A Functional Analysis of Political Advertising across Media, 1998. Communication Studies, 51(3), 274–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970009388524 Benoit, W. L., & Airne, D. (2009). Non-Presidential Political Advertising in Campaign 2004. Human Communication, 12(1), 91–117. Brader, T. (2005). Striking a Responsive Chord: How Political Ads Motivate and Persuade Voters by Appealing to Emotions. American Journal of Political Science, 49(2), 388. https://doi.org/10.2307/3647684 Brader, T. (2006). Campaigning for hearts and minds: How emotional appeals in political ads work. Studies in communication, media, and public opinion. Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press. Retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0622/2005009159-b.html Buell, E. H., & Sigelman, L. (2008). Attack politics: Negativity in presidential campaigns since 1960. Studies in government and public policy. Lawrence, Kan.: Univ. Press of Kansas. Ceccobelli, D. (2018). Not Every Day is Election Day: a Comparative Analysis of Eighteen Election Campaigns on Facebook. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 15(2), 122–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2018.1449701 Erigha, M., & Charles, C. Z. (2012). Other, Uppity Obama: A Content Analysis of Race Appeals in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 9(2), 439–456. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X12000264 Geer, J. G. (2010). In defense of negativity: Attack ads in presidential campaigns. Studies in communication, media, and public opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=319130 Kahn, K. F., & Kenney, P. J. (1999). Do Negative Campaigns Mobilize or Suppress Turnout? Clarifying the Relationship between Negativity and Participation. American Political Science Review, 93(4), 877–889. https://doi.org/10.2307/2586118 Kaid, L. L., & Holtz-Bacha, C. (Eds.) (2006). The SAGE handbook of political advertising. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications. Kanouse, D. E., & Hansen, L. R. (1987). Negativity in evaluations. In E. E. Jones, D. E. Kanouse, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett, S. Valins, & B. Weiner (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Lau, R. R. (1985). Two explanations for negativity effects in political behavior. American Journal of Political Science. (29), 119–138. Lau, R. R., & Pomper, G. M. (2004). Negative campaigning: An analysis of U.S. Senate elections. Campaigning American style. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Lau, R. R., & Rovner, I. B. (2009). Negative Campaigning. Annual Review of Political Science, 12(1), 285–306. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.10.071905.101448 Lau, R. R., Sigelman, L., & Rovner, I. B. (2007). The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: A Meta-Analytic Reassessment. The Journal of Politics, 69(4), 1176–1209. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00618.x Lee, C., & Benoit, W. L. (2004). A Functional Analysis of Presidential Television Spots: A Comparison of Korean and American Ads. Communication Quarterly, 52(1), 68–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/01463370409370179 Sigelman, L., & Kugler, M. (2003). Why Is Research on the Effects of Negative Campaigning So Inconclusive? Understanding Citizens’ Perceptions of Negativity. The Journal of Politics, 65(1), 142–160. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2508.t01-1-00007 Steffan, D., & Venema, N. (2019). Personalised, De-Ideologised and Negative? A Longitudinal Analysis of Campaign Posters for German Bundestag Elections, 1949–2017. European Journal of Communication, 34(3), 267–285. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323119830052 Surlin, S. H., & Gordon, T. F. (1977). How Values Affect Attitudes Toward Direct Reference Political Advertising. Journalism Quarterly, 54(1), 89–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769907705400113 Torres, I. M., Hyman, M. R., & Hamilton, J. (2012). Candidate-Sponsored TV Ads for the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election: A Content Analysis. Journal of Political Marketing, 11(3), 189–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/15377857.2012.703907 Voltmer, K. (2004). Mass media and political communication in new democracies: Routledge.

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.

Introduction In this article, we hypothesise how mainstream media coverage can promote the spread of disinformation about Covid-19. Mainstream media are often discussed as opposed to disinformation (Glasser; Benkler et al.). While the disinformation phenomenon is related to the intentional production and spread of misleading and false information to influence public opinion (Fallis; Benkler et al.), mainstream media news is expected to be based on facts and investigation and focussed on values such as authenticity, accountability, and autonomy (Hayes et al.). However, journalists might contribute to the spread of disinformation when they skip some stage of information processing and reproduce false or misleading information (Himma-Kadakas). Besides, even when the purpose of the news is to correct disinformation, media coverage might contribute to its dissemination by amplifying it (Tsfati et al.). This could be particularly problematic in the context of social media, as users often just read headlines while scrolling through their timelines (Newman et al.; Ofcom). Thus, some users might share news from the mainstream media to legitimate disinformation about Covid-19. The pandemic creates a delicate context, as journalists are often pressured to produce more information and, therefore, are more susceptible to errors. In this research, we focussed on the hypothesis that legitimate news can contribute to the spread of disinformation on social media through headlines that reinforce disinformation discourses, even though the actual piece may frame the story differently. The research questions that guide this research are: are URLs with headlines that reinforce disinformation discourses and other mainstream media links shared into the same Facebook groups? Are the headlines that support disinformation discourses shared by Facebook users to reinforce disinformation narratives? As a case study, we look at the Brazilian disinformation context on Covid-19. The discussion about the disease in the country has been highly polarised and politically framed, often with government agents and scientists disputing the truth about facts on the disease (Araújo and Oliveira; Recuero and Soares; Recuero et al.). Particularly, the social media ecosystem seems to play an important role in these disputes, as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters use it as a key channel to spread disinformation about the virus (Lisboa et al.; Soares et al.). We use data from public groups on Facebook collected through CrowdTangle and a combination of social network analysis and content analysis to analyse the spread and the content of URLs and posts. Theoretical Background Disinformation has been central to the Covid-19 “infodemic”, created by the overabundance of information about the pandemic, which makes it hard for people to find reliable guidance and exacerbates the outbreak (Tangcharoensathien et al.). We consider disinformation as distorted, manipulated, or false information intentionally created to mislead someone (Fallis; Benkler et al.). Disinformation is often used to strengthen radical political ideologies (Benkler et al.). Around the world, political actors politically framed the discussion about the pandemic, which created a polarised public debate about Covid-19 (Allcott et al., Gruzd and Mai; Recuero and Soares). On social media, contexts of polarisation between two different political views often present opposed narratives about the same fact that dispute public attention (Soares et al.). This polarisation creates a suitable environment for disinformation to thrive (Benkler et al.) The polarised discussions are often associated with the idea of “bubbles”, as the different political groups tend to share and legitimate only discourses that are aligned with the group's ideological views. Consequently, these groups might turn into ideological bubbles (Pariser). In these cases, content shared within one group is not shared within the other and vice versa. Pariser argues that users within the bubbles are exposed exclusively to content with which they tend to agree. However, research has shown that Pariser’s concept of bubbles has limitations (Bruns), as most social media users are exposed to a variety of sources of information (Guess et al.). Nevertheless, polarisation might lead to different media diets and disinformation consumption (Benkler et al.). That is, users would have contact with different types of information, but they would choose to share certain content over others because of their political alignment (Bruns). Therefore, we understand that bubbles are created by the action of social media users who give preference to circulate (through retweets, likes, comments, or shares) content that supports their political views, including disinformation (Recuero et al.). Thus, bubbles are ephemeral structures (created by users’ actions in the context of a particular political discussion) with permeable boundaries (users are exposed to content from the outside) in discussions on social media. This type of ephemeral bubble might use disinformation as a tool to create a unique discourse that supports its views. However, it does not mean that actors within a “disinformation bubble” do not have access to other content, such as the news from the mainstream media. It means that the group acts to discredit and to overlap this content with an “alternative” story (Larsson). In addition, the mainstream media might disseminate false or inaccurate disinformation (Tsfati et al.). Particularly, we focus on inaccurate headlines that reinforce disinformation narratives, as social media users often only read news headlines (Newman et al.; Ofcom). This is especially problematic because a large number of social media users are exposed to mainstream media content, while exposure to disinformation websites is heavily concentrated on only a few users (Guess et al.; Tsfati et al.). Therefore, when the mainstream media disseminate disinformation, it is more likely that a larger number of social media users will be exposed to this content and share it into ideological bubbles. Based on this discussion, we aim to understand how the mainstream media contribute to the spread of disinformation discourses about Covid-19. Methods This study is about how mainstream media coverage might contribute to the spread of disinformation about Covid-19 on Facebook. We propose two hypotheses, as follows: H1: When mainstream media headlines frame the information in a way that reinforces the disinformation narrative, the links go into a “disinformation bubble”. H2: In these cases, Facebook users might use mainstream media coverage to legitimate disinformation narratives. We selected three case studies based on events that created both political debate and high media coverage in Brazil. We chose them based on the hypothesis that part of the mainstream media links could have produced headlines that support disinformation discourses, as the political debate was high. The events are: On 24 March 2020, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro made a public pronouncement on live television. In the week before the pronouncement, Brazilian governors decided to follow World Health Organisation (WHO) protocols and closed non-essential business. In his speech, Bolsonaro criticised social distancing measures. The mainstream media reproduced some of his claims and claims from other public personalities, such as entrepreneurs who also said the protocols would harm the economy. On 8 June 2020, a WHO official said that it “seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person transmits [Covid-19] onward to a secondary individual”. Part of the mainstream media reproduced the claim out of context, which could promote the misperception that both asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic persons (early stages of an illness, before the first symptoms) do not transmit Covid-19 at all. On 9 November 2020, Brazil’s national sanitary watchdog Anvisa reported that they had halted the clinical studies on the CoronaVac vaccine, developed by the Chinese company Sinovac. Bolsonaro often criticised CoronaVac because it was being produced in partnership with São Paulo’s Butantan Institute and became the subject of a political dispute between Bolsonaro and the Governor of São Paulo, João Dória. Bolsonaro said the halt of the CoronaVac trial was "another victory for Jair Bolsonaro". Anvisa halted the trail after a "severe adverse event". The mainstream media rapidly reverberated the decision. Later, it was revealed that the incident was a death that had nothing to do with the vaccine. Before we created our final dataset that includes links from the three events together, we explored the most shared URLs in each event. We used keywords to collect posts shared in the public groups monitored by CrowdTangle, a tool owned by Facebook that tracks publicly available posts on the platform. We collected posts in a timeframe of three days for each event to prevent the collection of links unrelated to the cases. We collected only posts containing URLs. Table 1 summarises the data collected. Table 1: Data collected Dates March 24-26 2020 June 8-10 2020 November 9-11 2020 Keywords “Covid-19” or “coronavirus” and “isolation” or “economy” “Covid-19” or “coronavirus” and “asymptomatic” “vaccine” and “Anvisa” or “CoronaVac” Number of posts 4780 2060 3273 From this original dataset, we selected the 60 most shared links from each period (n=180). We then filtered for those which sources were mainstream media outlets (n=74). We used content analysis (Krippendorff) to observe which of these URLs headlines could reinforce disinformation narratives (two independent coders, Krippendorff’s Alpha = 0.76). We focussed on headlines because when these links are shared on Facebook, often it is the headline that appears to other users. We considered that a headlined reinforced disinformation discourses only when it was flagged by both coders (n=21 – some examples are provided in Table 3 in the Results section). Table 2 provides a breakdown of this analysis. Table 2: Content analysis Event Mainstream media links Headlines that support disinformation discourses Number of links Number of posts Economy and quarantine 24 7 112 Asymptomatic 22 7 163 Vaccine trial 28 7 120 Total 74 21 395 As the number of posts that shared URLs with headlines that supported disinformation was low (n=395), we conducted another CrowdTangle search to create our final dataset. We used a sample of the links we classified to create a “balanced” dataset. Out of the 21 links with headlines that reinforced disinformation, we collected the 10 most shared in public groups monitored by CrowdTangle (this time, without any particular timeframe) (n=1346 posts). In addition, we created a “control group” with the 10 most shared links that neither of the coders considered could reinforce disinformation (n=1416 posts). The purpose of the “control group” was to identify which Facebook groups tend to share mainstream media links without headlines that reinforce disinformation narratives. Therefore, our final dataset comprises 20 links and 2762 posts. We then used social network analysis (Wasserman and Faust) to map the spread of the 20 links. We created a bipartite network, in which nodes are (1) Facebook groups and (2) URLs; and edges represent when a post within a group includes a URL from our dataset. We applied a modularity metric (Blondel et al.) to identify clusters. The modularity metric allows us to identify “communities” that share the same or similar links in the network map. Thus, it helped us to identify if there was a “bubble” that only shares the links with headlines that support disinformation (H1). To understand if the disinformation was supporting a larger narrative shared by the groups, we explored the political alignments of each cluster (H2). We used Textometrica (Lindgreen and Palm) to create word clouds with the most frequent words in the names of the cluster groups (at least five mentions) and their connections. Finally, we also analysed the posts that shared each of the 10 links with headlines that reinforced disinformation. This also helped us to identify how the mainstream media links could legitimate disinformation narratives (H2). Out of the 1346 posts, only 373 included some message (the other 973 posts only shared the link). We used content analysis to see if these posts reinforced the disinformation (two independent coders – Krippendorff’s Alpha = 0.723). There were disagreements in the categorisation of 27 posts. The two coders reviewed and discussed the classification of these posts to reach an agreement. Results Bubbles of information In the graph (Figure 1), red nodes are links with headlines that support disinformation discourses, blue nodes are the other mainstream media links, and black nodes are Facebook groups. Our first finding is that groups that shared headlines that support disinformation rarely shared the other mainstream media links. Out of the 1623 groups in the network, only 174 (10.7%) shared both a headline that supports disinformation discourse, and another mainstream media link; 712 groups (43.8%) only shared headlines that support disinformation; and 739 groups (45.5%) only shared other links from the mainstream media. Therefore, users’ actions created two bubbles of information. Figure 1: Network graph The modularity metric confirmed this tendency of two “bubbles” in the network (Figure 2). The purple cluster includes seven URLs with headlines that support disinformation discourse. The green cluster includes three headlines that support disinformation discourse and the other 10 links from the mainstream media. This result partially supports H1: When mainstream media headlines frame the information in a way that reinforces the disinformation narrative, the links go into a “disinformation bubble”. As we identified, most of the headlines that support disinformation discourse went into a separate “bubble”, as users within the groups of this bubble did not share the other links from the mainstream media. Figure 2: Network graph with modularity This result shows that users’ actions boost the creation of bubbles (Bakshy et al.), as they choose to share one type of content over the other. The mainstream media are the source of all the URLs we analysed. However, users from the purple cluster chose to share only links with headlines that supported disinformation discourses. This result is also related to the political framing of the discussions, as we explore below. Disinformation and Political Discourse We used word clouds (Lindgreen and Palm) to analyse the Facebook groups’ names to explore the ideological affiliation of the bubbles. The purple bubble is strongly related to Bolsonaro and his discourse (Figure 3). Bolsonaro is the most frequent word. Other prevalent words are Brazil, patriots (both related to his nationalist discourse), right-wing, conservative, military (three words related to his conservative discourse and his support of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985), President, support, and Alliance [for Brazil] (the name of his party). Some of the most active groups within the purple bubble are “Alliance for Brazil”, “Bolsonaro 2022 [next presidential election]”, “Bolsonaro’s nation 2022”, and “I am right-wing with pride”. Figure 3: Purple cluster word cloud Bolsonaro is also a central word in the green cluster word cloud (Figure 4). However, it is connected to other words such as “against” and “out”, as many groups are anti-Bolsonaro. Furthermore, words such as left-wing, Workers’ Party (centre-left party), Lula and Dilma Rousseff (two Workers’ Party ex-presidents) show another ideological alignment in general. In addition, there are many local groups (related to locations such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, and others), and groups to share news (news, newspaper, radio, portal). “We are 70 per cent [anti-Bolsonaro movement]”, “Union of the Left”, “Lula president”, and “Anti-Bolsonaro” are some of the most active groups within the green cluster. Figure 4: Green cluster word cloud Then, we analysed how users shared the mainstream media links with headlines that support disinformation discourses. In total, we found that 81.8% of the messages in the posts that shared these links also reproduced disinformation narratives. The frequency was higher (86.2%) when considering only posts that shared one of the seven links from the purple cluster (based on the modularity metric). Consequently, it was lower (64%) in the messages that shared one of the other three links. The messages often showed support for Bolsonaro; criticised other political and health authorities (the WHO, São Paulo Governor João Dória, and others), China, and the “leftists” (all opposition to Bolsonaro); claimed that quarantine and social distancing measures were unnecessary; and framed vaccines as dangerous. We provide some examples of headlines and posts in Table 3 (we selected the most-shared URL for each event to illustrate). This result supports H2 as we found that users shared mainstream media headlines that reinforce disinformation discourse to legitimate the disinformation narrative; and that it was more prevalent in the purple bubble. Table 3: Examples of headlines and posts Headline Post "Unemployment is a crisis much worse than coronavirus", says Bolsonaro Go to social media to support the President. Unemployment kills. More than any virus... hunger, depression, despair and everything UNEMPLOYMENT, THE DEPUTIES CHAMBER, THE SENATE AND THE SUPREME COURT KILL MORE THAN COVID19 Asymptomatic patients do not boost coronavirus, says WHO QUARANTINE IS FAKE #StayHome, the lie of the century! THIS GOES TO THE PUPPETS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTIES THE AND FUNERARY MEDIA Anvisa halts Coronavac vaccine trial after "serious adverse event" [The event] is adverse and serious, so the vaccine killed the person by covid And Doria [Governor of São Paulo and political adversary of Bolsonaro] wants to force you to take this shit This result shows that mainstream media headlines that support disinformation narratives may be used to reinforce disinformation discourses when shared on Facebook, making journalists potential agents of disinformation (Himma-Kadakas; Tsfati et al.). In particular, the credibility of mainstream news is used to support an opposing discourse, that is, a disinformation discourse. This is especially problematic in the context of Covid-19 because the mainstream media end up fuelling the infodemic (Tangcharoensathien et al.) by sharing inaccurate information or reverberating false claims from political actors. Conclusion In this article, we analysed how the mainstream media contribute to the spread of disinformation about Covid-19. In particular, we looked at how links from the mainstream media with headlines that support disinformation discourse spread on Facebook, compared to other links from the mainstream media. Two research questions guided this study: Are URLs with headlines that reinforce disinformation discourses and other mainstream media links shared into the same Facebook groups? Are the headlines that support disinformation discourses shared by Facebook users to reinforce disinformation narratives? We identified that (1) some Facebook groups only shared links with headlines that support disinformation narratives. This created a “disinformation bubble”. In this bubble, (2) Facebook users shared mainstream media links to reinforce disinformation – in particular, pro-Bolsonaro disinformation, as many of these groups had a pro-Bolsonaro alignment. In these cases, the mainstream media contributed to the spread of disinformation. Consequently, journalists ought to take extra care when producing news, especially headlines, which will be the most visible part of the stories on social media. This study has limitations. We analysed only a sample of links (n=20) based on three events in Brazil. Other events and other political contexts might result in different outcomes. Furthermore, we used CrowdTangle for data collection. CrowdTangle only provides information about public posts in groups monitored by the tool. Therefore, our result does not represent the entire Facebook. References Allcott, Hunt, et al. “Polarization and Public Health: Partisan Differences in Social Distancing during the Coronavirus Pandemic.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 26946 (2020). 6 Jan. 2021 <https://doi.org/10.3386/w26946>. Araújo, Ronaldo Ferreira, and Thaiane Moreira Oliveira. “Desinformação e Mensagens Sobre a Hidroxicloroquina no Twitter: Da Pressão Política à Disputa Científica.” Atoz – Novas Práticas em Informação e Conhecimento 9.2 (2020). 6 Jan. 2021 <http://dx.doi.org/10.5380/atoz.v9i2.75929>. Bakshy, Eytan, et al. “Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook.” Science 348.6239 (2015). 6 Jan. 2021 <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6239/1130>. Benkler, Yochai, et al. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Blondel, Vincent D., et al. “Fast Unfolding of Communities in Large Networks.” Physics.soc-ph (2008). 6 Jan. 2021 <http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0803.0476>. Bruns, Axel. Are Filter Bubbles Real?. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. CrowdTangle Team. CrowdTangle. Menlo Park, Calif.: Facebook, 2020. <https://apps.crowdtangle.com/search/>. Fallis, Don. “What Is Disinformation?” Library Trends 63.3 (2015): 401-426. Glasser, Susan B. “Covering Politics in a ‘Post-Truth’ America.” Brookings Institution Press, 2 Dec. 2016. 22 Feb. 2021 <https://www.brookings.edu/essay/covering-politics-in-a-post-truth-america/>. Gruzd, Anatoliy, and Philip Mai. “Going Viral: How a Single Tweet Spawned a COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory on Twitter.” Big Data & Society, 7.2 (2020). 6 Jan. 2021 <https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720938405>. Guess, Andrew, et al. Avoiding the Echo Chamber about Echo Chambers: Why Selective Exposure to Like-Minded Political News Is Less Prevalent than You Think. Miami: John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, 2018. Hayes, Arthur S., et al. “Shifting Roles, Enduring Values: The Credible Journalist in a Digital Age.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 22.4 (2007): 262-279. 22 Feb.2021 <https://doi.org/10.1080/08900520701583545>. Himma-Kadakas, Marju. “Alternative Facts and Fake News Entering Journalistic Content Production Cycle”. Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9.2 (2017). 6 Jan. 2021 <https://doi.org/10.5130/ccs.v9i2.5469>. Kripendorff, Klaus. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. California: Sage Publications, 2013. Larsson, Anders Olof. “News Use as Amplification – Norwegian National, Regional and Hyperpartisan Media on Facebook.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 96 (2019). 6 Jan. 2021 <https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699019831439>. Lindgreen, Simon, and Fredrik Palm. Textometrica Service Package (2011). 6 Jan. 2021 <http://textometrica.humlab.umu.se>. Lisboa, Lucas A., et al. “A Disseminação da Desinformação Promovida por Líderes Estatais na Pandemia da COVID-19.” Proceedings of the Workshop Sobre as Implicações da Computação na Sociedade (WICS), Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação, 2020. 6 Jan. 2021 <https://doi.org/10.5753/wics.2020.11042>. Newman, Nic, et al. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018. Oxford: Oxford University, 2018. Ofcom. “Scrolling News: The Changing Face of Online News Consumption.” 2016. 23 Feb. 2021 <https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0022/115915/Scrolling-News.pdf>. Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble. New York: Penguin, 2011. Recuero, Raquel, and Felipe Soares. “O Discurso Desinformativo sobre a Cura do COVID-19 no Twitter: Estudo de Caso.” E-Compós (2020). 23 Feb. 2021 <https://doi.org/10.30962/ec.2127>. Recuero, Raquel, et al. “Polarization, Hyperpartisanship, and Echo Chambers: How the Disinformation about COVID-19 Circulates on Twitter.” Contracampo (2021, in press). 23 Feb. 2021 <https://doi.org/10.1590/SciELOPreprints.1154>. Soares, Felipe Bonow, et al. “Disputas discursivas e desinformação no Instagram sobre o uso da hidroxicloroquina como tratamento para o Covid-19.” Proceedings of the 43º Congresso Brasileiro de Ciências da Comunicação, Salvador: Intercom, 2020. 23 Feb. 2021 <http://www.intercom.org.br/sis/eventos/2020/resumos/R15-0550-1.pdf>. Tangcharoensathien, Viroj, et al. “Framework for Managing the COVID-19 Infodemic: Methods and Results of an Online Crowdsourced WHO Technical Consultation.” J Med Internet Res 22.6 (2020). 6 Jan. 2021 <https://doi.org/10.2196/19659>. Tsfati, Yariv, et al. “Causes and Consequences of Mainstream Media Dissemination of Fake News: Literature Review and Synthesis.” Annals of the International Communication Association 44.2 (2020): 157-173. 22 Feb. 2021 <https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2020.1759443>. Wasserman, Stanley, and Katherine Faust. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

The plausibility of a ‘celebrity-artist’ is met with scepticism, suspicion and/or outright disdain amongst those who guard the traditions surrounding the exclusionary world of ‘High Art’. As a construct unique to the advent of media culture, the vapid and transient nature associated with contemporary celebrity negates the high-minded notion of genius retrospectively applied to a ‘hero-artist’ such as Michelangelo or Rembrandt. (Chris Rojek’s categories are useful in illustrating this difference. While the celebrity of earlier artists was based on talent, and thus, ‘achieved celebrity’, current media-generated celebrity, or what Rojek terms ‘celetoid’, is transient and artificially generated.) For media-celebrity is an immediately accessible veneer, a stopgap in our moments of boredom, and a point of ‘other’ against which we situate our desires, not expected to provide anything more or less significant than mass-entertainment. This contradicts or otherwise undermines the anticipation that Art express the ‘profound’, possess ‘essence’ if not ‘beauty’, or be part of the politically-motivated avant-garde. The two-dimensional world of ‘media-ted culture’ (a term I use to describe the manner in which the media mediates culture, as opposed to mass culture which presupposes a top-down construction of culture denying the free-play of signs and free-will of cultural consumption), with its attribute capitalist underpinnings, complicates the depth and emancipatory potential of Art, and, by extension, appears to threaten the entire elitist infrastructure of the Artworld by association to or blending with ‘mass culture’. In addition to a general malaise fuelled by the troublesome notion of a ‘Culture Industry’, these ideological Artworld constants maintain their position in the post-postmodern Nineties as the curmudgeonly core of criticism, particularly that scripted within the realm of the ‘popular’ media, aimed at contemporary art and its celebrity occupants. In his text Art and Celebrity, John Walker discusses the career trajectory of British-born artist Damien Hirst remarking that some critics “regard him as a frivolous clown whose showmanship robs art of its dignity” and further, “think his work has contributed to the dumbing down, coarsening and vulgarisation of British culture” (Walker 247). The relationship of the character of the artist to the form of his artworks, I will assert, is not an organic occurrence but a media-ted one. As an artist whose media-persona appeared to be driven by fame and the excesses and lifestyle it afforded, and who created work which seemed to reflect a rather disinterested, dispirited and dismissive attitude similar to that persona, Hirst finds himself in the conundrum of having become an artist whose financial success and art historical dilemma is his relationship to those self-same processes he utilized to achieve success at the start of his career. I will briefly sketch the mechanisms which led to Hirst’s definition within the purview of the popular, and follow by suggesting an art historical repositioning of his work. Damien Hirst currently enjoys a peaceful, rural existence as the third highest-paid British artist alive today, having sky-rocketed to success in the Nineties as the ‘founder’ of the loose-knit group known as ‘young British art’. A product of the can-do attitude associated with Thatcherism and encouraged by his teachers, particularly the American-born Conceptualist Michael Craig-Martin, Hirst actively participated within the endorsement of his works and those of his London-based Goldsmith College classmates. Freeze, his first attempt at curation, has taken on mythic status in defining the group, and its professional gloss — particularly within its marketing strategy — is viewed as the precursor to an artistic disposition far more interested in fame and fortune, than form. (For a full discussion of Freeze, from a particularly Marxist perspective, see Stallabrass. His rebranding of ‘young British art’ into ‘High Art Lite’ sums up his position quite precisely. For a more light-hearted approach, see Collings.) As he progressed in his career during the early Nineties, and in conjunction with the promotional savvy of his dealer Jay Jopling, Hirst received frequent mention in specialist and popular media alike, quickly becoming known as young British art’s enfant-terrible. His lewd public behaviour, when collapsed as a single performance with his Art, was construed as a media-friendly spectacle which actively sought to attract the voyeuristic gaze of popular culture. This ploy appeared to work. Due to the familiarity granted by extensive media coverage, his images were subsequently co-opted within a number of marketplaces, ranging from film to advertising. For the first time in Britain an unusual cultural twist placed the world of High Art, embodied within the media-ted-performance-installation piece ‘Damien Hirst’, squarely within the realm of everyday experience. The ubiquity of his forms prompted friend/author Gordon Burn to pronounce that Britain was now under the influence of “a new intangible poetry becoming part of modern life” (Burn 10), or, in other words, had entered ‘Hirstworld’. Although the collapsing of work and artist within the realm of ‘modern life’ has art historical precedents, most obviously within the oeuvre of Andy Warhol, Hirst created a juxtaposition within his personality which largely undermined notions of what constituted the ‘Artist’. In contrast with Warhol’s eclectic ‘artsy’ public persona, Hirst presented himself as an average ‘Northern lad’: rowdy, temperamental, beer-swilling. His antics were part of the common cultural vernacular and when viewed in conjunction with the supposed media-friendly nature of his works, as Rosie Millard reflects, “Even if they hated it, people felt like they could have an opinion, because they understood what was going on” (Millard 21). Yet what did the public really understand, and how did they come to understand it? While a higher than normal attendance at the Sensation exhibit was regarded as an indicator of the success of young British art, the vast majority of the non-specialist audience commenting on these works based their assessment and interpretation of them on the exposure granted them by the mass media. The media-tion of yBa, particularly in the flagrant reporting of the artists’ statements and antics, flattened complexities or intertextual meanings into a by-line, which was meant to capture the imagination of a new audience for contemporary art in an easily consumable form. Although specialist criticism predictably ran the gambit, popular criticism was quite often disparaging or otherwise derogatory, and almost always took a biographical approach to describing the objects. Thus, what the public appeared to ‘understand’ was related much more to the hype and celebrity surrounding the artists, particularly the main protagonist Hirst, than of any issue related to form, appreciation or the history of art. Even more detrimentally, this conflation of art with biography led to many misunderstandings related to form, particularly in the assumption of its intention as ‘shock-art’ (as in Sister Wendy’s statement – see Wroe). An editorial letter printed in The Times points to this problem: “I am sure I am speaking for the general public when I say that these exhibits are not challenging, not clever, not funny and certainly not art” (Taylor 5; italics are mine). Outside of the media attention it garnered, young British art was as incomprehensible to its public as contemporary Art ever had been, even if the personalities of the artists and their motifs were easily recognizable. The notoriously fickle British were suspect of the equation: shark in formaldehyde = art. As Andrew Graham-Dixon notes, “They distrust the modern artist for old-fashioned puritanical reasons, being suspicious of any work of art which appears, to them, to have involved little work. They also suspect modern art of trying to fool them with a spurious jiggery-pokery” (Graham-Dixon 202). And perhaps more significantly, a class system which remained highly stratified continued to be firmly in place in the Nineties and was intensely critical regarding the allotment of government funds. (A well-documented incidence of this is the public outcry that occurred after the Tate purchased a work by Carl Andrew consisting solely of a line of firebrick.) The only thing that seemed shocking to the public was the promotion of the decadent young British artists with their spurious forms and high-fashion lifestyle. Exposure to the allegory of yBa led to the over-riding sentiment: ‘I could make that too, now give me my fame!’ (Incidences of this were rampant in the papers, i.e. members of the ‘working-class’ were shown displaying fish and chips in the gallery, other papers suggested ways to make-your-own Hirst; for one example, see Independent.) Not only did media-ted biography influence public opinion, but it infiltrated specialist art writing as well. Creating a direct link between biography and subject, Burn conflates objects which could be read as expressing an element of alienation with Hirst’s ‘predicament’ as a celebrity figure: “Celebrity is about control and distance; it is about adding space to the space that inevitably exists between human beings and remaining apart from the flock” (Burn 10; clearly co-opting Hirst’s vitrine sculpture of a lamb caught in mid-leap Away From The Flock to highlight this sentiment.) This sort of psychoanalytical approach edges, at best, slightly out of the realm of persona and into that of the personal. Either type of reading is regarded by Julian Stallabrass as possible only because of an intentional ambiguity on the part of the artist which allows the art object to posture as Art. For instance, Hirst provides sweeping generalizations regarding his objects, often associating them to the ‘grand narratives’ of life and death, and is at times even contradictory, employing a vague multi-referentiality which Stallabrass feels heightens the sense of ‘something important going on’. (Stallabrass suggests this is accomplished by utilizing theory without either acknowledgement or political/emancipatory intent in order to provide an illusion of sophistication. Hirst thus presents ‘The Death of the Author’, an art which appears to speak to intertextuality, only to make effectual use of it.) While Stallabrass’s own critique of yBa also conflates the persona of the artist with the artworks, he feels the media-tion of the artists has worked in their favour: “…behaviour and object-making together, fosters a feeling that it must be authentic because of its intimate link with the artist’s self, no matter how sham that self may be” (Stallabrass 247). The success of yBa is, therefore, based on a mythology regarding the persona of the artist, and a misreading of works that are otherwise “[a] combination of Hammer-style schlock and high-art minimalist rigour” (Stallabrass 26). Both of these critiques point to the central issue in an assessment of yBa (and a perennial problem for contemporary art in general): the possibilities of interpretation. In yBa in particular, interpretation has become a problem based on the conflation of the persona of the artist with their works, which I would attest is part of a larger problem regarding the confusion surrounding the relationship between the aesthetic and the spectacle, and the difficulties each term represents in popular and academic discourse alike. In the instance of Damien Hirst, the outcome of this confusion is an inability to accurately historicize the objects which comprise his oeuvre, additionally denying its aesthetic potential and dismissing the climate in which it was created. Unarguably, Hirst’s art contemplates the experience of life: as a cultural phenomenon in its contemplation of spectacular society, and as a tenuous state of embodiment, of the conditions in which we experience a state of ‘alive’. His objects (as signs or texts) provide a means to consider the dynamics in which human beings experience aesthetics, as well as providing an experience of that experience: systems which emphasize the sentient experience of phenomenology. The significance of the legacy of Hirst’s art (and of yBa generally) has already begun to be written in relation to its interaction with the media: as “conceptual work in visually accessible and spectacular form” (Stallabrass 4). While it would be disingenuous to suggest that Hirst has not capitalized or intentionally pandered to the media attention he received, it would be equally naïve to presume that his effort is purely a charade, or a mass-manipulation. The conflation of a media-ted biography with form negates the more significant aspects of Hirst’s work and its various dialogues with visual culture, the viewers in that culture and otherwise, and the history of visual objects, while simultaneously undermining the relative value of the image within contemporary society generally by association to capitalism and art-as-production. Perhaps there is a middle-ground between the Death of the Author, and Obsession with the Author? In reconsidering the aesthetic as a dialectical and culturally-bound sentient response resulting from interaction with an art object and experienced beyond the constraints of the beautiful, the importance of the first-hand interaction with art returns, shifting would-be viewers away from the water-cooler and back to the wonder of the art-experience in its many spectacular guises. References Burn, Gordon. “Hirstworld.” The Guardian 31 Aug. 1996: 10. Collings, Matthew. Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst. London: 21 Publishing Ltd., 1997. Graham-Dixon, Andrew. A History of British Art. Los Angeles: U of California P, 202. The Independent. “Review: Damien Hirst: DIY for Enthusiasts.” 18 Sep. 1997: 9. Millard, Rosie. The Tastemakers: UK Art Now. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001. Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books, 2001. Stallabrass, Julian. High Art Lite. London: Verso, 1999. Taylor, Grace. “Unpleasant Sensation.” Magazine Letter. The Times 27 Sep. 1997: 5. Walker, John A. Art and Celebrity. London: Pluto Press, 2003. Wroe, Martin. “Sister Wendy Puts Boot into Damien.” The Guardian 12 May 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style LeBlanc, Carrie. "Stop Press!: Sister Wendy Refers to the Work of Celebrity-Artist Damien Hirst as 'Gossip Shock-Horror Art'!." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/13-leblanc.php>. APA Style LeBlanc, C. (Nov. 2004) "Stop Press!: Sister Wendy Refers to the Work of Celebrity-Artist Damien Hirst as 'Gossip Shock-Horror Art'!," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/13-leblanc.php>.