Weapons of Mass Deception

How Right-wing Media Wage Information Warfare and Undermine American Democracy

Yunkang Yang (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

224 Seiten

2026
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-782030-8 (ISBN)

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Mistrust of the democratic electoral process has become rampant among Americans, particularly Republican voters. This trend carries profound consequences: widespread disputes over election results and resistance to the peaceful transfer of power threaten to undermine the very fabric of American democracy. It is, therefore, essential to understand why mistrust is spreading. No analysis is complete without a thorough accounting of the role of right-wing media in US politics.

Weapons of Mass Deception challenges the conventional wisdom that right-wing media outlets like Breitbart News and Fox News function primarily as news organizations, using empirical analysis to demonstrate how they more closely resemble political organizations. Analyzing nearly four million online articles published by thirty major right-wing media outlets, Yunkang Yang finds that disinformation consistently ranked among the highest engagement stories between 2017 and 2020. Internal emails, Federal Election Commission filings, legal documents, and conversations between right-wing media employees illuminate the organizational patterns and practices underlying this data. Yang highlights the risk of "privatized political patronage," as platforms pursue both profits and strategic political objectives on behalf of their funders, owners, managers, and political allies. He further reveals the complexities of the right-wing media sphere and argues that when these goals align across networks, they can form a powerful political machine capable of misleading millions of Americans.

Ultimately, this book reveals how organizations spread disinformation for partisan aims by exploiting the credibility afforded to traditional journalism, and it lays the framework for understanding how disparate right-wing media outlets coalesce into a unified weapon of mass deception.

Yunkang Yang (Ph.D., Communication, University of Washington) is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University. His research uses quantitative and computational methods with large-scale digital media datasets to examine the disruptive role of media in American politics. Professor Yang serves on the editorial board of Political Communication and was a fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute in the summer of 2023. In 2022, during his postdoctoral appointment at the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University, he submitted his research on right-wing media to the United States House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack.

Introduction
All the Billionaires' Men
Flood the Zone with Shit
Divided We Fall
In GOP We Trust
The Fox ''News'' Effect
Conclusion
Appendix

Erscheinungsdatum	13.11.2025
Reihe/Serie	Journalism and Political Communication Unbound
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	157 x 234 mm
Gewicht	340 g
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Journalistik
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Kommunikationswissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Staat / Verwaltung
ISBN-10	0-19-782030-1 / 0197820301
ISBN-13	978-0-19-782030-8 / 9780197820308
Zustand	Neuware