‘Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!’ An Automated Analysis of the Dynamics of Truth Contestation in Austrian and Czech News Media

Contemporary politics has been characterized by increasing accusations of dishonesty, falsehoods, and appeals to opinions instead of factuality and knowledge. Communicating truth and lies not only relates to the spread of misinformation and disinformation but is also strategically employed by different actors to relativize the truth as a shared assessment of reality. Politicians challenge their opponents by accusing them of lying and manipulating the people, while creating their own versions of “truer” reality. This paper analyzes the discourses of truth contestation to assess how truth and lies were discursively constructed and used by different societal and political actors in Austrian and Czech news media. We take the debate on migration as a prime example for an instance of the post-truth discourse as part of the media representation of a politically highly salient and polarizing topic. The two countries make a good case for comparison due to their different affectedness and handling of the refugee crisis as well as different public reactions to the crisis. In particular, Austria has been on the direct refugee route with 88,160 asylum seekers in 2015, while only 1,515 refugees came to the Czech Republic. The initial political and public reactions to the crisis differed as well: Austria saw a rather welcoming, pro-refugee approach, while the Czech Republic experienced antagonistic and sometimes even xenophobic responses by parts of political representatives and the public. In the paper, we analyze the print versions of the three most popular national newspapers with different political leanings (conservative vs. liberal) and journalistic routines (tabloid vs. broadsheet) and the two most popular disinformation online media platforms per country, for which we expect wealthy material for analysis. Based on a selection of seed words covering the truth-lie polarity, we then use automated content analysis, more specifically latent semantic scaling, to scale media coverage on migration regarding the prominence and dynamics of truth contestation. Building on a post-truth political communication approach, we cover the period of 2013-2020 and take a comparative perspective looking for country and newspaper differences, with a special focus on the political actors driving such discourse relying on named entity recognition techniques. Overall, our study contributes to the debate by offering insights into the dynamics of truth contestation as a pressing challenge to the functioning of democracy.