GUEST ARTICLE: Emotion, lies, and “bullshit” in journalistic discourse: The case of fake news

Abstract

Emotion is part and parcel of all kinds of human experience and as such plays an important role in all discourse types, including professional discourse. In the 21st century more than ever, the proper channeling and expression of our emotions at the workplace has come to be considered a sign of emotional intelligence, powerful leadership, and (harmless) persuasion skills. In this article we analyze the genre of fake news within professional journalistic discourse. We carry out a qualitative sociopragmatic analysis of samples of political and scientific fake news in English, and show how this kind of journalism aims at manipulating readers’ emotions not only through the use of prototypical lies (i.e. assertions whose content the speaker believes to be false, uttered with the intention of deceiving the hearer), but mainly by means of complex discourse-pragmatic strategies such as the skillful manipulation of the three chief evaluative subsystems, aTTITudE, EngagEMEnT and graduaTIon (Martin & White, 2005), the triggering of false inferences and the display of misleading images, thus playing with the scalarity of lying. This leads us to some important conclusions showing that the fact that the linguistic expression of falsity can be scalar is intimately connected with the concepts of “bullshit” (Frankfurt, 2005) and “post-truth” (Keyes, 2004): a good story that somehow touches readers’ emotions prevails over a true story, because the readers choose to accept as true what makes them “feel good”