Disputed credibility in digital journalism: discursive strategies of Brazilian fact-checking organizations from media conglomerates

Abstract

Amidst a growing credibility crisis in the press, several digital fact-checking initiatives, many of them linked to media conglomerates, have proliferated in Brazil. This article examines the discursive strategies employed by legacy media fact-checking projects to understand how they are presented to readers and how they claim credibility to their activities. Our study takes as a corpus of analysis the presentation texts and the specification of the working methods of five Brazilian fact-checking organizations from media conglomerates. We characterize the primary discursive sequences used by these initiatives and the subjects implicated in their discursive production through a discursive analysis from the French line.